Tuesday, January 11, 2005

Simplicity is spreading

It seems that most developers are coming to understand that simplicity is the answer to many of the problems software development faces, not more complexity. We've been talking about this for a while. Now, it seems that the rest of the world is starting to see the same thing. An editorial in eWeek magazine touts simplicity as preferable to complexity. They are talking about it in non-developer and simplistic terms (i.e., making the point that UI consistency is a form of simplicity), but the message is starting to spread amongst the non-developers. Could it be that these guys have been listening to developers talk, and have osmosed the idea?

In the same issue (in fact, on the facing page), a guest editorial editorializes in the same vein. He talks about the complexity of monsters like ERP systems and single-vendor lock-in. Could it be that the masses (albeit the informed masses -- we are talking about eWeek here) are finally starting to understand that Windows represents a huge business-model-trumps -technology mess of highly coupled cruft? Hopefully, someday this will lead to the death of software written to enforce monopolies and towards some really useful stuff. Not anytime soon, though...

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