It's Too Easy - Part III - In Search of a Shorter Letter
A quiet night in 8-bit Paris If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter - attr. Blaise Pascal I've spent about 1500 words arguing against making things too complex, so we should just opt for the easiest possible solution, right? Well, being easy isn't all that easy. Remember way back in Part I, when I discussed entropy ? And remember when I said that we often make things too complex because we assume that complexity is the natural state of a solution? It turns out that's true. How many times have you looked at something and decided it's going to be a simple task ( I know I'll hang that drywall myself!), and 8 hours and a trip to the emergency room later, you realize there were a lot of details you overlooked during your initial estimate that made the task decidedly not simple? That's precisely why people spend so much time working through the details of a complex solution during planning (the ultimate universal joke being that, often, ...
