Simple, Stupid

Following my ongoing fossil-endeavours, I decided to read the book The Cathedral and the Bazaar, as it's also mentioned in fossil's docs. It is a collection of essays, the first named A Brief History of Hackerdom. In Chapter 4 (The Rise of Unix), it reads:

Unix and C had some other important strengths. Both were constructed from a "Keep It Simple, Stupid" philosophy. A programmer could easily hold the entire logical structure of C in his head (unlike most other languages before or since) rather than needing to refer constantly to manuals

This reminded me of a piece I read some days ago. In Apple is killing Swift (caution: links to Substack) the author is arguing that and how Apple has ruined the Swift programming language over time, partly by making it more complex.

It reasonated quite well with me, as I like simple tools. I'm not a very smart person, so my tools need to be simple, or at least easy to use, and I have strong feelings of tools getting more and more complex.

But, as this is still the Internet and someone is always wrong, I don't agree with the author at every point: SwiftUI is fun, but crap and most definitely not pretty damn good.