Why Can't We Make Simple Software? - Peter van Hardenberg

[@Drudge.Miller]

1:40 Chapter 1 What is complexity 3:38 Chapter 2 A bestiary of software complexity 4:00 Defensive Code 6:53 Defensive Code Observations 7:37 Scale 9:50 Scale Observations 10:31 Leaky Abstraction Observations 12:48 Model/Reality Gaps 16:35 Hyperspace 18:34 Chapter 3 Homeostasis 19:53 Complexity homeostasis 24:20 Chapter 4 Theories of complexity 29:25 Chapter 5 Living with Complication 39:14 Complexity Quotes 36:48 "Simplification via amputation." 38:36 "I'm fixing computers that don't exist, in a data center I've never been to, for people I've never met." Thank you very much for the talk.

[@Drudge.Miller]

Hey Handmade Cities, the like is lovely but it would have been nice if you asked if you can copy my comment to your description and pinned my comment. Now it looks like I copied it. "little bit mad smiley". However, thanks for the upload of the talk.

[@petervanhardenberg]

Thanks @Drudge.Miller! Appreciate you taking the time.

[@orpal]

On the seatbelt stuff: I highly recommend the book "killed by a traffic engineer" It talks about how road designs that "make roads safer" like wider lanes and such actually cause people to drive faster and crash more often.

[@JordanManfrey]

This presentation is basically the talk I have with every stakeholder at some point but most of it just gets dismissed as “nerd shit”

[@mustardofdoom]

We can all seek to be better communicators. Being correct is not always the right way to approach the discussion. And don't be afraid of analogy. In this case, we are talking about the difference between jotting down a grocery list versus writing an entire encyclopedia. Most people will get that those are very different problems.

[@alvaromoe]

@@mustardofdoom dude, what makes you think that OP is "afraid of analogies"? What if he's a great communicator but the other party is refusing to listen? Ironic that you start by "we can all seek to be better communicators" and follow up with such a patronizing comment.

[@sp3ctum]

I have had to have this conversation with some business people. Most seem to understand ok when using layman's terms to explain why something cannot be done, for example. Then there are the ones that really do refuse to listen. They may be looking for a short time benefit like a bonus, and want to switch companies the next year anyway. I don't know what to do about those.

[@Alceste_]

@@alvaromoe I think regardless of whether OP is already a great communicator or not, a philosophical tip on how the only thing we can really control is the way we present information (and not the way people stay firmly unable to understand shit), followed by general tip on how some achieve getting understood is a fairly okay intervention. Didn't come off as particularly insulting / patronizing to me.

[@bojcio]

This presentation is basically the talk I have with every skateboarder at some point but most of it just gets dismissed as “nerd shit”

[@GurtTarctor]

A really good general talk about complexity/simplicity is Alan Kay's "Power of Simplicity" talk, the key aphorism of which is "You get simplicity by finding a slightly more sophisticated building block to build your theories out of." Highly recommended.

[@ximono]

That's a great quote from a great talk (by a great man).

[@jonascarvalho7331]

What an outstanding presentation! Your eloquence, sense of humor, captivating theme, seamless coherence between the slides and your narration, and, above all, your incredible charisma made it truly remarkable. Thank you!

[@csours]

21:44 "Some people are just smarter than me and understand the more complex system they made" Not in my experience. They just implemented write only code. They understand it because THEY BUILT IT. If someone else made it they would have almost as hard a time understanding it as an average developer.

This is me looking at this moment at a BE I designed years ago, that it's broken because of an update and not understanding what it does.

[@D4no00]

I tend to agree with this, but at the same time the definition of smart is so subjective, that even that other statement it's true. From my experience, keeping unnecessary complexity out of a codebase is very hard work and it's an actual upfront resource investment, because it takes more time to do properly. Companies love developers that dwelve into complexity because they can deliver "fast" and a lot of managers that sadly are decision-makers in most of those companies care only about having the ability to deliver fast, very few of them care about long-term impact as the only thing they have to do is to leave that project when it gets to the point that it explodes. The sad truth is also that a lot of products can easily get away with being written in this way, as the profitability of the business is usually the core pillar that keeps the project alive, it's very rare that it is related to how well the product was made.

[@rumplstiltztinkerstein]

Me writing super complex code: "I am so smart" Me after 1 hour break: "What the heck was I trying to do here?"

[@JordanManfrey]

in my experience what helps me is constantly trying to view every abstraction or interface I create from a “would this piss me off if I saw it in a random library” perspective. Empathy and self-critique is the key to writing software that isn’t trash to read

[@storage9578]

the missing piece: Skill isn't static. 5y later you look with a beginner skill at something you wrote on expert level. Same if you look at someone else's code. Documentation often is inadequate because being self-aware of what part of your knowledge is nontrivial is hard. You only notice its bad when you look at it as a stranger years later.

[@MattWyndham]

This is the whole fun part of Factorio, constantly growing the complexity as you grow the factory and your goals.

[@HrHaakon]

The factory must grow to meet the growing demands of the factory.

[@lobovutare]

Programming is the art of making complexity trade-offs. In order to become a guru you need to work on a single software product for a decade. Things that never crossed your mind would ever become a problem, now become a problem. You learn through regret.

[@PavelHenkin]

'you learn through regret' is a very true line.

[@ThePC007]

Or things that you thought could become a problem and that you therefore planned ahead for, turn out to become an even bigger problem than you had anticipated, for which reason your prematurely implemented solution won't save you. :(

[@brdrnda3805]

Yep, and then you are assigned to the team that creates the successor of that single software product and people just ignore you when you tell not to do x (and explain why) because you're an old f*ck, who doesn't understand the fancy new technology.

[@noahw4623]

​@@PavelHenkin I love it, it's great

[@kudorgyozo]

"You learn through regret" I felt that on a deep emotional level

[@widget5963]

I think one of the important things that doesn't really get much time in the talk is that moving complexity off to libraries and services means we can write software that does many more things with smaller budgets. Webapps are popular not only because they're the only truly cross-platform environment, but because they ship with a very flexible rendering engine and huge ecosystem support for many frameworks. I think the real complexity is hidden in state management. External (outside your computer) dependencies add more state to track. User interaction adds more state. File access adds state. Multi-step UI flows add state. Updating third-party dependencies (often for potential security issues) is state (on the dev's side) that changes and can mess up your code. All of these state-heavy systems can fail at various points, requiring other parts of your applications' state to update in response. It's covered somewhat in the NxM complexity section but I think it could use more focus.

[@elektro-peter1954]

Why can I give only one Thumb up on this? Man - this guy is just amazing! We can't have simple things because of reasons! What he describes is exactly like my work - the software just becomes as complex as it can under these conditions. That's just how it is. What a realization!

[@this-is-bioman]

Software becomes complex (whatever this means) because of carelessness.

[@tabletuser123]

@@this-is-biomanyou dont actually program anything meaning if u think this lmao

[@this-is-bioman]

@@tabletuser123 or maybe you're just too afraid to accept the truth of your negligence when programming ;-]

[@outwithrealitytoo]

"many articulation points in a distributed system with more free variables , more places where things can go fast or slow, or arrive out of order". I love the term "articulation points". If you think of a system as a structure with components under compression and tension, more points of articulation makes you see why complexity is an issue.

[@Sheblah1]

It's like sandpile dynamics

[@albertweber1617]

In games it's a huge challenge to eradicate the side-effects of implementation complexity, but you have to actually grow and nurture the gameplay complexity. You have to create an expressive language and system that can only expresses itself in "fun" ways, and it's so fucking difficult.

[@awvalenti]

This talk answered many existential questions I had for decades... Especially the part "better tools won't solve the problem". Thanks 🙏!!

33:28 This is what Terry A. Davis di with Temple OS. He reduced possibilities and set hard constraints.

[@lifelover69]

Awesome talk, insightful, and funny. I feel that it's grounded, based on Peter's industry experience, but also hopeful for a better future by innovating out of current mess, based on Peter's research background. Exciting!

We need to talk more about complexity in the software industry :) Nice talk, I really enjoyed it. There's a minor "mistake", though. Accidental and Essential complexity concepts were introduced by Frederick Brooks in his brilliant paper: No Silver Bullet. Moseley and Marks did an outstanding job by elaborating further these concepts, though. Great talk Mr Van Hardenberg.

[@mo3k]

Great talk. I appreciate the work put into this. "Reinventing the wheel" is how we can figure out how it works in order to better improve on it. I believe we can learn to build better things in simpler ways...but first, we have to build simpler things in better ways.

[@meatcow417]

Great talk. Good examples, and great external references.

[@TythosEternal]

Phenomenal. I thought i was the only person thinking this way. Well done.

[@lukor-tech]

Very light and approachable with difficult subjects in the background. Thanks!

[@JordanManfrey]

EF6 reminds me of the “dangerously powerful abstraction”. It’s an ORM that can do anything - but if you do certain things it will pull basically the whole database in a single query into memory implicitly at runtime and good luck figuring out when it wants to do that

[@tutacat]

By the time you calculate the timezones, there is a new update to implement to them.

[@AntonioRonde]

Superb talk! Thank you Mr. van Hardenberg

[@the_magnus]

Such a great, fun, relevant to-the -point experienced-based talk. Thank you, eatching this made my morning routine vastly improved.

[@brucewilliams6292]

Thanks for putting this up. The speaker definitely has experienced the edge case biting the bum.

[@SianaGearz]

Aaah the seatbelt story and Peltzman effect. Aka the dangers of taking one study and basing your life philosophy around it, no matter if its methods have since been deemed faulty and whether there's research with entirely opposite conclusions been performed numerous times since.

[@ruanmed]

Yeah, well, his specific assumption about the homeostasis of car accidents being due to people being more comfortable with seatbelts is wrong because seatbelts infact reduced fatal accidents as far as I know. However, at the same the cars evolved in other aspects giving more general stability to all cars (suspension improvements are a great example), so yeah, in many ways I can see how people would be more willing to take more risks while driving, backing up his homeostasis idea, however yeah, I agree it would more interesting to present actual factual data, or at least based on multiple studies and not some rebuked stuff.

[@Croix1]

@@ruanmedyeah i can also see how it makes sense, but it's not the actual reality. that risk homeostasis is just not real. just because something sounds sensible doesn't mean it's true. that's called the common sense fallacy

[@aliothspectranet5678]

Regarding the seatbelt thing, is there data to suggest that people drive riskier now than they did prior to the mandate?

[@aliothspectranet5678]

and I'm not talking about people immediately after the mandate, I'm talking about nowadays when most people dont know life without it

[@--2-3---]

Useful information, I hope more people can learn from this. Thank you for the presentation!

[@ArielBenichou-cx3vu]

i'm glad youtube showed me this. great talk!

[@user-fed-yum]

If more people could grasp these simple complicated concepts and have a real world exposure to them, our world would be a better place.

[@ArthurSchoppenweghauer]

6:32 Libraries. don't. reduce. complexity. What they do is make you *think* your code is simpler and less complex, because you now need to write fewer lines. But in reality your project now depends on this library. What if the repository that stores the library is down, corrupted, etc? What if you install a newer version of the library that introduces breaking changes and you now need to rewrite your code? The amount of complexity has not been reduced, only changed, arguably for the worse, because now you're subject to changes made by *other people*. And now you need a package manager, a docker container, your build takes forvever to complete and you need to pull all of the libraries source code into your project, even though you only need maybe 10% of it.

[@lobovutare]

You're trading one type of complexity for another, but that trade-off might still help you reduce complexity with respect to your use-case. The complexity isn't gone, but it is, at least temporarily but at best for all of time, is out of your way.

[@realcundo]

This reminds me the discussion around simple vs easy. Simple means lower complexity, easy means complexity is hidden or abstracted away but it's still there.

[@SimónHenríquezLind]

He didn't say external libraries, you can make your own

[@mkvalor]

Nothing of consequence has ever been built without relying upon the work of *other people*. This is simply a "cost of doing business" that may be reduced but never eliminated.

[@gbraadnl]

libraries abstract => they introduce a layer of abstraction, and therefore hide complexity.

[@systemsincode7023]

I think I'll be rewatching this a few times and nodding in agreement each time.

[@CaioCodes]

What an awesome talk, really engaging!

[@smort123]

Johnathan Blow literally crying and shaking after watching this

[@JordanManfrey]

He’s like an academic that releases games instead of white papers, software engineering isn’t really his thing lol

[@dirtiestbomb1715]

He's a prime example of the "gazing into the void" that van Hardenberg was talking about. He's dove deep into complexity by writing own esoteric language and compiler, gaining excellent runtime benefits but at the major cost of nobody except him ever having a chance to use or improve his tools.

[@Wave_Commander]

@@dirtiestbomb1715 that's not entirely true. They do have a closed beta for jai that has just been limited to people that are actually interested in using it for large scale projects and games

[@Muskar2]

@@dirtiestbomb1715 Skewing the facts without technically being wrong in a contrarian way is what gets traction, I guess. This is the time I don't love the Internet

[@orderandchaos_at_work]

The times we've been through this, it hurts.

[@JoeJoeTater]

It bugs me that he uses "complexity" and "complication" interchangeably. They're different things, and I don't think you can effectively manage either one without that distinction. Complexity is difficulty emerging from simple interactions. Complication is difficulty from an accumulation of exceptions. Lambda calculus is complex. HTML/CSS is complicated.

[@josephbolton8092]

Informed and engaging talk ❤

[@ximono]

24:28 Come on, cyclomatic complexity was the most interesting part! All code is essentially a directed graph. I think it's very useful to see it that way. It's not just a metric. Great talk!

[@jack-d2e6i]

Not if goto has anything to say about it!

[@tabletuser123]

@@jack-d2e6inobody has written a single goto statement in 20 years

[@ximono]

@@jack-d2e6i Even code with goto can be modelled as a graph, each goto an edge between points in code. Spaghetti code.

[@jack-d2e6i]

@@ximono I was specifically referring the "directed" qualifier. Once you have cycles, is not just a degenerate graph?

[@jack-d2e6i]

Looks like I'm wrong. I guess I thought directed graphs were necessarily acyclic, which is false.

[@orange-vlcybpd2]

5:30 refers to "Shotgun parsers in the cross-hairs" from BruCON Security Conference

[@Vondanzigkungfu]

Thank you ♥

[@heckyes]

"Thank god every now and then someone does actually re-invent the wheel - lest they all be made of stone"

[@morwar_]

Complexity is good because it creates demand. Listening to this talk made me realize you have to find people that like you and you like them so you can work together in things that you both find interesting. Being hired by someone just to keep up with the complexity is bad because if you fix it everybody might lose their jobs.

[@winkbrace]

There is always something to do, unless the business has gone bankrupt. This idea of keeping up complexity is silly.

[@morwar_]

@@winkbrace It is not, you just have been very lucky to work on amazing companies. It is a jungle out there.

[@dancing_frank_lee]

Absolutely love this! 🌟

[@nnov_tech_chan7891]

It is good when author speaks out literally my thoughts, even if it is a controversy. We are thinking in the same way.

[@Voy2378]

Stupid YT blocks final slide with related videos, maybe Handmade Cities in the future can make sure to put some filler seconds at the end with their logo so presentation is not ruined.

[@DodaGarcia]

All aspects of the end screen (its elements, layout and timing) are customizable by the uploader.

This is a great talk

[@BramHarmsen]

great talk!

[@flavour-of-qualia]

this is gold. love ink and switch

[@DarylMetzler]

So good! Excellent talk

[@helcacke]

Great talk, I specifically enjoyed the idea of reducing scope to just try building with what you know. I struggle with that a lot, and think AI will help with that... if we can figure out how that would work in scope 😂

[@JordanManfrey]

36:48 if you can’t run it locally, it’s architected like shit or you’ve married yourself to shit tooling or bad vendors. People who write bespoke stuff against a single cloud vendor’s product line with zero apprehensions scare the shit out of me

[@YeloPartyHat]

Amen

[@AlexGalo0]

I love this, please do more

[@drelijahmikail3916]

Most people are already either suffering or muffed to silence on the current status quo of IT janitoring. The problem with inventing new languages is ITU (Inventing The Unnecessary). It is akin how Dr Nobel Price invent the talky stick on Sesame Street.

[@greenageguy]

I like to think of software complexity as entropy. Entropy is always increasing but we can control the rate of growth by being deliberate.

[@nycdotnet4751]

Great talk!

[@RobertBlair]

Shout-out for using "Shovelware" idiom!

[@EmmanuelMess]

One thing you don't really mention is the complexity of the teams working of the software.

[@JordanManfrey]

Would be fun to talk about how the complexity is often limited to the capacity of the dumbest developer on the team

[@tallreed0]

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

[@EmmanuelMess]

@@tallreed0 Yes, but I would like to hear what he had to say about conway's law affecting complexity.

[@stratfanstl]

Great presentation. I was a bit distracted for the first ten minutes while trying to recall who the speaker sounded like. Then it hit me. He sounded exactly like Dave Grohl (of the Foo Fighters) talking about software.

[@bettercallsean]

I was thinking the exact same thing!

[@Mograw]

I was hopeful someone else would notice! If Dave ever needs to tap out and this coding thing isn't cutting it anymore, this guy would be a great candidate 😂

[@SuperOblivionfan]

Yo I loved teenage zombies as a kid, def gunna watch the rest of the talk now lol

[@Maxjoker98]

The Excel team not wanting to use an "external"(as in team, not even company) C compiler sounds absolutely insane.

[@philipoakley5498]

if "complexity occurs when systems have internal interactions" (& when stuff bumps into each other) then it's a thermodynamics 101 problem [statistical mechanics even] of determining the system _temperature_ and which adjacent system is hotter (the chaos will flow from there)

[@TryboBike]

As information processing system grows, it tends to a state where it uses infinite resources to do absolutely nothing.

[@JordanManfrey]

16:20 “it ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble - it’s what you know for sure that just aint so”

[@christianagava]

really good stuff

[@StarryNightSky587]

This is great, why does it have so few views?

[@jordanhowlett9172]

Not anymore :0

[@ZE_TRVTH_NVKE]

We, who care about efficiency for our own sake, can, but the people, who only care about their wages, can't.

[@thewhitefalcon8539]

Why would you care about more if you don't get paid to care?

[@ZE_TRVTH_NVKE]

@thewhitefalcon8539 Exactly. If they didn't have a job, in which they don't have a stake, they wouldn't care about anything, because they don't have their own ideology of life.

[@RR-hl6zi]

We're not doing charity work, so throwing the 'wages' argument in is a bit dishonest.

[@siddharthkrishna8463]

People paying the wages should pay them to care then

[@ZE_TRVTH_NVKE]

@@siddharthkrishna8463 If they won't make a simple system for free - for themselves - they won't do it for money - someone else - either.

[@Muskar2]

I've had enough of authoritative software opinions/commentary and minimal falsifiable statements and evidence. But at least we can agree on a vision of simpler software

[@vacyyyy]

is this an old talk? i feel like ive heard this before

[@ArielBenichou-cx3vu]

the fonts on those slides 😙👌

[@miquelbrazil]

I thought I was the only person that noticed things like this 😍

[@ArielBenichou-cx3vu]

@@miquelbrazil do you know what is the typeface used? now i'm intrigued

[@digriberis6547]

Really enjoyed the illustrations as well!

[@steffengroenandersen]

18:51 Seatbelts definitely save lives... I understand his point but he should chosen another metaphor.

[@snorman1911]

I think you missed the point.

[@steffengroenandersen]

@snorman1911 Can you elaborate?

[@widget5963]

@@steffengroenandersen Seatbelts save lives in the same types of crashes. But when you put seatbelts on people, they feel safer, so they drive in riskier ways. They end up in worse crashes than before, and the net effect is that the same amount of people are killed/injured overall. (In this specific case, the real answer is to make sure people don't drive in riskier ways. There's loads of advocates on and off KZbin for methods to slow down cars without affecting traffic much.)

[@LowestofheDead]

What's interesting is that his seatbelt example was actually debunked. And his Jevon's paradox ignores that we get a better and cheaper products when consumption increases to a new limit.

[@muesique]

So true! But it's going both ways. If you scale up things happen that are told here. But same things going to happen when you scale down. You develop and test on a desktop but your target is a raspberry zero. And suddenly your wifi hangs or computation lasts forever! Things you could have done with scripting now need to be in machine code now.

[@alter_ukko]

35:52 +100 for the East Fork coffee mug

[@henrykkaufman1488]

You know why? Because converter from TextMate text editor theme format (xml) to VS Code editor theme format (json) is only available through npm, so I have to get npm, and npm needs nodejs, so I have to get node. To convert from XML to json i need a package manager software and node.js runtime envirnoment! Where are we living??? It's easier for me to code a makeshift converter relying on documentation XD

[@IkarusKommt]

Holy f**k! One needs to install an interpreter to use scripts in its language! What's happened to the world?!!!1111

[@henrykkaufman1488]

@IkarusKommt seems like you suggest im unreasonable for expecting planets most common file format, offline converter app to work without package installer and and a dedicated server runtime. Maybe, but just to be clear - it's javascript. You have the interpreter in all your browsers and all your electron apps.

[@plateoshrimp9685]

If you want to do less with less it's also pretty easy to set up an environment to develop for the Game Boy, NES, or DOS, or ??? In addition to the simplicity, there's also the fact that the architecture is set in stone. If your application runs on the original hardware, you did it right.

[@spacewad8745]

good talk

[@TheMohawkNinja]

"Vigilance is not a strategy" Oh, it very much is. Ask anyone who works with anything physically dangerous for a living (heavy machinery, firearms, etc.) and there is one thing you will hear repeated throughout all of these industries: You don't blindly trust safety. Even when you are 100% sure the gun doesn't have any bullets in it, you still don't point it at anyone until that barrel is physically removed from the gun. Likewise, you don't stick your hand in a piece of heavy machinery until the power has been physically disconnected and the appropriate lockout/tagout procedure has been carried out. When it comes to coding, never just trust that the library will be perfectly secure or even intuitively coded. You really should audit the source code (or at least the documentation) of the library to know exactly how it handles edge cases and code accordingly. Just the other day I found out that I couldn't even assume that std::stoi() in a try/catch would ensure that the input string is a valid integer because std::stoi("123 hello") will return 123.

[@edwardmacnab354]

instead of catching the error just be more informative at the outset what must be specific about the input so that if the 500 comes back you know you made an input error and try again .

[@snorman1911]

Then you end up wasting tons of time trying to figure out what the cause was. I just added exception handling for db timeouts and return a 504 so the FE devs can know a metrics call simply timed out or it failed due to a hard error I need to be bugged about. Errors about input validation have saved countless hours of debugging.

[@bersi3306]

From The Zen of Python: "Complex is better than complicated."

[@michaelgraflmusic]

He's got the exact same voice as Dave Grohl. Yes, that's my contribution to this comment section.

[@edencandelas]

embrace complexity

[@EnriqueSalceda-k4v]

Defensive programming does not always leads to such a complexity overhead. It depends how its implemented.

[@philipoakley5498]

No simple examples of complex systems ? (rhet.)

[@Dexter101x]

Even the consumers of EA Sports complain about their software

[@jeanklein2198]

Peter's voice sounds like Dave Grohl. Great talk btw

[@houssamassila6274]

The dude made his entire point by how he introduced himself.

[@HarlowBurn]

This is like listening to Dave Grohl teaching programming

[@justin2221]

please put slides on something dimmer than a supernova

[@rkj11107]

this talk reminds me of most seinfeld episodes

[@jakobw135]

Doesn't COMPLEXITY become manageable, when each of the INTERACTING COMPONENTS, are SIMPLE & ELEGANT?

[@ganjus0055]

You can beat the complexity by applying "reboot" by AI code transformations

[@John-p6u]

Because there is no demand for it. People want more functionality. The only possible way to simplify things is to better organize.

[@bartech101]

If David Grohl was a Software Engineer he would be called Peter van Hardenberg

[@Ollerismo]

😂

[@Suzi-QCodes-gh9rp]

I'm waiting for Peter to break out his Gretch

[@koluj192]

17:58 we need middle out algorithm

[@drstrangelove09]

quote goes after the period in the U.S. !!!

[@melanovapedia7924]

Maybe i need to rewatch, i still dont get it, even i know this kind of alternative of thinking. Still, interesting, and thanks for share.

[@Summanis]

Don't let the Standard C++ Foundation see 24:00

[@EvenTheDogAgrees]

Hahah, not that far into the video yet, but let me guess. "Question"? 😂

[@JordanManfrey]

“A Clever Person Solves a Problem. A Wise Person Avoids It”

[@gbraadnl]

songbird, that XUL-based player, was an interesting attempt. but used the wrong tech, XUL.

[@BraveMugisha]

Such a great talk! (Stsuch a great way to put: stable APIs really do undermine the value of the system sometimes.)

[@scrawnydaghost]

Terry Davis was right

[@philadams9254]

Google "Write less code" and thank me later. Also: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." - Einstein (apparently)

[@mickymadfree]

"Write less code". Do you mean some particular article or everyone?

[@philadams9254]

@@mickymadfree All the articles. There's a lot of discussion on this topic. Less code = less to go wrong and less to maintain. You want the bare minimum to get the job done, but not to the point where it's too little or confusing code. If you set yourself that challenge, you will be surprised how many lines of code can be removed. To help achieve this, sometimes, things are better written inline rather than being spread out over many functions too, but this is not what most people are taught.

[@JustinKoenigSilica]

​@philadams9254 What difference does it make if i write three nested functions vs three lines of code? This doesnt actually help doing anything.

[@philadams9254]

@@JustinKoenigSilica That was just one example to illustrate a point. It is a concept called 'locality of behaviour' and helps readability, complexity and lines of code. In theory, it shouldn't make a difference, but reduces the chances of bugs due to having all the necessary code clumped together in one location. It's not really necessary and down to personal preference but many people have written about it or made videos explaining why it has helped them.