Simplicity Rules!

Sam Ruby recently posted a great presentation on amongst other things simplicity. Adam Bosworth posted a long article a while ago in a similar vein. It seems that the importance of simplicity is being recognized.

I am not sure that it is simplicity of implementation as in being not sophisticated that is being suggested, rather it is elegance or simplicity of the solution. The original Mac was a complex piece of engineering as was the original Palm but both had simplicity of use.

Open source drives simplicity by rubbing off parts of a design that have unnecessary complexity. Open source projects that have community value tend to get simpler as in easy to build test and deploy because no one wants to go through complex steps again and again using up their most valuable commodity - personal time. To take an example from Sam's talk - try installing and running WebSphere versus JBoss - last time I tried, I gave up on WebSphere after several hours while I had JBoss downloaded and running in less than 30 minutes. (This is not a recommendation that programming J2EE is a model of simplicity ;-)).

Rapid evolution towards simplicity is usually the result of several smart people driving a solution to a shared problem. Open source by its nature attracts more people and as it is a meritocracy it gets rid of over complex solutions pretty quickly. Having development teams organized in a similar fashion grinds out clean solutions faster too.

Making simplicity a goal in integration is key to success - it can be an aspirational goal i.e. integration may never but point and click but unless the goal is simplicity rather than solving many imaginary problems then the possibility to asymptotically approach it will never happen. So setting simplicity of solution is always the right goal.