What Thorsten Ball thinks about simplicity
Co-founder of Amp and co-host of the Raising an Agent podcast. Wrote Writing an Interpreter in Go.
Everything they publish, on ppll ↗
Thorsten Ball did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
4 dated positions, 2015 to 2022, in their own words. Our reading of what Thorsten Ball has said — not written or endorsed by them.
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Their wordsCode has mass. Every additional line of code you don't need is ballast. It weighs your codebase down, making it harder to steer and change direction if you need to.
↗Professional Programming: The First 10 Yearsthorstenball.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 7 years earlier
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Our readingMeta-programming is usually unnecessary complexity that obscures what code is meant to do.
Their wordsBut there are a lot more cases in which meta-programming is unnecessary and additional baggage on top of the solution, which gets in the way of understanding what the code is supposed to do.
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Their wordsA lot of complex, "look at this clever trick", overly-abstracted, unreadable code works and makes the tests pass.
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Their wordsNot every elegant solution is straightforward, but "stupid" ones are, per definition, and can also be elegant.