simplicity 4
- Simplicity is a choice, and a system that is not simple is its builders' fault.
- Simplifying often leaves you with more things, not fewer: simplicity is about not tangling things together, not about counting them.
Rich Hickey
Creator of the Clojure programming language and of Datomic. His rationale for Clojure is one of the few language design documents that argues its case rather than describing its syntax.
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What Rich Hickey says most about
design 3
- Locking is too hard for programmers to get right over and over again, so the language runtime should do that part.
- Object orientation is overrated: it was born of simulation and is now applied everywhere, including where it does not fit.
software quality 2
- Tests and type checkers are safety nets: they do not make a system simple, so they cannot touch the core problem of understanding it.
- Mutable stateful objects are the new spaghetti code: hard to understand, hard to test and hard to reason about.