“We’ve all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.”
—unknown

Your humble author at work writing this article.

I love to quote people quoting me. I do this by creating a vanity feed— I like to look at it as stalking myself. Skimming my vanity feed last night, I read this:

Terry Chay once said something that resonated with me — one of the few things, actually — and it was something like this: complex > complicated, and that simple does not necessarily mean “not complex”. The point is that you can have a complex implementation that covers many use cases, without the implementation being complicated, and with the API still being relatively simple.
—Matthew Weier O’Phinney

Only a few? Geez. I’m (almost) hurt. Next time, I see you, I’m going to call you Matthew O’Phinney.

For reference, here is the talk where Matthew is referring to, along with other previous references.

Since, like Matthew I work on a framework, I thought some of you might find this simple/simplistic complex/complicated distinction resonates with you as you write code.

I can’t claim credit for this idea. It comes from a different monkey, well before the internet:

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”
—Albert Einstein