Simplicity

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication - Leonardo da Vinci

Rich Hickey presented a fantastic talk, Simple made easy - "Rich Hickey emphasizes simplicity’s virtues over easiness', showing that while many choose easiness they may end up with complexity, and the better way is to choose easiness along the simplicity path."

Anders Hejlsberg mentioned simplexity in an interview a while back as well where he says "Let me first talk a little bit about how I view simplicity in general. No one ever argues that simplicity isn't good, but people define simplicity in a variety of ways. There's one kind of simplicity that I like to call simplexity. When you take something incredibly complex and try to wrap it in something simpler, you often just shroud the complexity. You don't actually design a truly simple system. And in some ways you make it even more complex, because now the user has to understand what was omitted that they might sometimes need. That's simplexity. So to me, simplicity has to be true, in the sense that the further down you go the simpler it gets. It shouldn't get more complicated as you delve down. "


Over time I have seen quite a few systems with too much complexity. And mostly it was not needed. Just a lot of code added without too much thought to design. More thought should be put into design and refractoring and testing.

It is also funny how this parallels to a sense of minimalistic design for design and architecture.