The Brash Programmers at 37signals Will Tell You: Keep It Simple, Stupid

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/16-03/mf_signals

by drm237 • 18 years ago

18 6 18 years ago

Keeping it simple is actually quite hard. As an engineer, almost every impulse of mine is to add more, more, more! I'm designing a consumer electronic device and the trick is to make it look simple to the user by making it quite complex inside.

edw519• 18 years ago

Yes. I know I'm making progress when "lines of code" starts DECREASING. Sometimes, the most sophisticated code is surprisingly small.

altano• 18 years ago

Yeah, I completely agree, but I don't think most people realize what this means. Deciding to make something simple isn't a choice you make up front. It's something you fight the whole way through. You have to fight your own temptations to add instead of subtract, you have to fight the cries of users who want just one more feature, etc. The simple thing to do will rarely be obvious

Look at the reaction to arc's release: it made people (who probably had no intention of building anything in it in the first place) enraged at its initial lack of unicode support. Imagine that... enraged at the lack of unicode support in the initial release of a programming language. It's hard to look at that reaction and realize what it really means: that Paul's probably on to something.

henning• 18 years ago

"He began by congratulating the nascent Ruby on Rails community (and, by extension, himself), citing a litany of impressive achievements: 500,000 downloads of the code"

That's about how many downloads PHP gets every couple weeks.

jraines• 18 years ago

I think that was pretty early in the life of Rails though

mixmax• 18 years ago

I think that the attitude of the 37signal guys will eventually backfire, and it might be about to happen.

Whenever someone comes out guns blazing promoting something as the next coming of christ (excuse the verbose wording) people will have a tendency to want to pull them back down to earth, and look for small mistakes that they can use to do so.

Just the other day on YC news I saw a comment about their book getting real being "a load of bullshit", and I have seen comments like it elsewhere.

The people that have long term success tend to be much more humble about what they do. Linus Thorvalds is a good example. We don't want to bring him back down to earth, because he already has his feet solidly planted there.

I have absolutely nothing against the 37signal guys, just pointing out how human nature works...

The Brash Programmers at 37signals Will Tell You: Keep It Simple, Stupid

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