Music, Simplicity, Smalltalk.

Years ago I remember an interview with the musician Sting (of Police fame).  Sting joked about some of their songs having only three chords, simplicity indeed!  And of course in some songs Sting didn't dip too deeply into his literary bucket to write lyrics like "De do do do, De dah dah dah" :-) .  But I guess a song doesn't have to be complex to be either good or popular.  And of course, they added innovative things like reggae beats and rhythms, to make things more interesting.  In another interview I believe Sting said that in some songs it was difficult to play and sing at the same time.  Why?  My guess is things like syncopated beats and other complexities that would require diligent attention, at least initially. 

So how does any of this remind me of Smalltalk?  I have always stipulated (along with many) that the simplicity of Smalltalk puts a low mental burden on the developer, and then they are able to focus more attention to the business or domain problem at hand.

I can also surmise that this is one of the reasons that Smalltalkers are also innovators, creating things like design patterns, XP, Croquet, even Eclipse.

Your thoughts? -Arden

I always marveled at the following scenario.  Picture two developers; one can take a difficult business problem, boil it down to its essence, and code it, making it simple and understandable.  The second developer, by contrast, doesn't really understand it (or take the time to understand it) and hacks away cryptically until he, partly by luck, gets it to work acceptably.  Now imagine a manager with no development experience, who looks at the work of the two developers.  The first, he finds simple, and understandable, and finds this work unremarkable.  The second he finds cryptic, and can't really make heads or tails of it.  His (erroneous) conclusion is that the second cryptic programmer is a genius, with great work, after all - it’s beyond his comprehension.

 
Developers know that it takes a great deal of work to simplify a difficult problem, to filter out the non-essential issues and make it straightforward and understandable.  It may have all the hallmarks of ideal software; - easier to understand and maintain, and also easier, because there is simply less of it.  It might even execute faster for many reasons including a smaller cache footprint, and not doing unnecessary thing. All else being equal less is more here.