My monkey typing resonates

“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

Chimp typing

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

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.