Over the past year or so I’ve been collecting quotes about simplicity. Here is a short collection of my favorites:
Einstein: “Everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.”
“Even the simplest solution is bound to have something wrong with it.”
Grady Booch:, “The function of good software is to make the complex appear to be simple.”
C.A.R. Hoare: “There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.”
The pretty clear impression anyone would get from listening to Roger Peppé discuss his work environment is that he values simplicity. If you think I’m overstating things, consider the title the folks at Sourcegraph opted to give their conversation with him. The video is worth viewing. I’ll use the rest of this post to talk about what benefit I’ve personally seen since deciding to pay the cost of simplicity for myself.
To begin with, my approach to simplicity is not too different from Peppé’s. I have plan9port installed on my laptop. I pretty much live in Acme, having embraced its pared back approach to editing for a little more than two years now. Before that I was an avid Vim user.
The thing about Vim is that it’s complicated, and that complexity has a cost. Most of the cost is maintenance. Vim has support for syntax highlighting, so that needs to be updated every time a new language comes out or an old one gets updated. The same goes for the compiler plugins, each of which needs to understand how to parse output from its compiler into Vim’s Quickfix window. I’m not saying these are hard things to do given some background knowledge. But they need to be done. And I haven’t even mentioned all of the code in Vim to deal with different types of terminals and terminal emulators1.
Vim has a lot of maintainers, so if you use it, you’ll probably never see any of that complexity. It’s the maintainers who do. And they’re working for free, because they presumably love Vim. So it’s a win-win, right? You get the joy of using Vim, and the maintainers get the joy of maintaining it.
Except it’s not really true that you’ll never see that complexity. You almost definitely will. You’ll realize Vim has a plugin system, and so you’ll want to learn how to leverage that to make the experience a little better. You’ll learn that there are a lot of third-party color themes out there, so you’ll put time into finding just the right one. You’ll join the ranks of folks online who compete to have the longest .vimrc file. Or maybe you’ll join the group that rolls their eyes at those people and competes for the shortest.
I can say this with some confidence, because this was me. And Vim is just one example. I’ve used plenty of tools that boast being hyper-configurable. My experience has been that that very configurability is a source of cognitive burden.
Yak shaving has a hallowed tradition in computer programming, but it seems to have expanded to encompass tasks that bear no obvious relationship to the task at hand and add no value to it. Looking back, I can see that having endlessly configurable tools gave me endless opportunity to fiddle with them. And this felt important! Maybe I’m more prone to distraction than most, but I got to a point where I couldn’t really handle language keywords being displayed to me in the wrong shade of blue. If I know I can change the color, then why not change it?
Fast-forward to today: I use a text editor with no syntax highlighting, and doesn’t even have a config file. Meanwhile, professionally I’ve had probably the most productive years of my life. Simplicity has a cost, but I’ve found it to be much less than the cost of complexity.
- I could talk more about developers romanticizing doing everything possible in a terminal window, but that’s a post for another time. ↩︎
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