🧵1of3 Design Simplicity & Thinking Elegance
Albert Einstein: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
CS Stanford Edu: "Our particularly interpretation of worse-is-better is as follows: When tradeoffs are required in a software system, priority should go to implementation simplicity at the expense of completeness or correctness."
🧵2of3
Richard Gabriel "The worse-is-better philosophy is only slightly different (MIT/Stanford style of design's The Right Thing):
Simplicity: the #design must be simple, both in implementation and interface. It is more important for the implementation to be simple than the interface. Simplicity is the most important consideration in a design.
Correctness: the design must be correct in all observable aspects. It is slightly better to be simple than correct.
Consistency: the design must not be overly inconsistent. Consistency can be sacrificed for simplicity in some cases, but it is better to drop those parts of the design that deal with less common circumstances than to introduce either implementational complexity or inconsistency."
Source: https://web.stanford.edu/class/archive/cs/cs240/cs240.1236/old/sp2014/readings/worse-is-better.html
🧵 3of3
The last portion of Richard Gabriel's #WorseIsBetter is most salient pour moi:
"Completeness: the design must cover as many important situations as is practical. All reasonably expected cases should be covered. Completeness can be sacrificed in favor of any other quality. In fact, completeness must sacrificed whenever implementation simplicity is jeopardized. Consistency can be sacrificed to achieve completeness if simplicity is retained; especially worthless is consistency of interface."
NGL the CS Stanford Edu (middle of thread was the more enjoyable read for me)
Sun Kitty ☀️