alt Hacker NewsThe word simple is used here a way I'm having trouble wrapping my head around.
This specific usage appears to come from this linked talk, Simple Made Easy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxdOUGdseq4
My reaction to the Unix pipeline was that, the reason it exploded in complexity is because the pieces were too simple. They were insufficiently expressive.
But the word is used in a different way here, and I'll have to watch the talk to understand what exactly is meant. (Something like orthogonality?)
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>the reason it exploded in complexity is because the pieces were too simple
the reason it exploded in complexity is because the complexity is in the interaction of the parts, not the properties of the parts. It's not so much about expressiveness but about the fact that the Unix philosophy has a willful disregard for systems thinking.
Russ Ackhoff has the analogy of the house. How do you design rooms in a house? Only ever with the house in mind. You can't just hope the rooms work, you always need to check whether a new room improves the house, if somethings wrong you fix the room, not the house.
Unix tools have a disregard for the house. Clojure works well because every part of Clojure is designed not just to improve itself but to improve Clojure. Emacs is similar in that regard, you can see that when people make Emacs packages. The good ones always have Emacs in mind, not just their own functionality.
Agreed. There are multiple senses for "simple" and on of those senses is "small". It is actually a very useful sense too, as Solomonov/Levin/Kolmogorov/Chaitin-style inductive reasoning has shown.
And it is important not to just make snappy quips by equivocating.
I don’t know. This reads more like a “Clojure is great” post, and Clojure is great. But the author takes a swing and a miss on the Rich Hickey magic. The UNIX example is contrived (the number of occurrences in the order they occur?), and trying to redefine simple in a way that excludes UNIX pipelines doesn’t work.