Bigger, More Complex, and More Violent
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction. (Albert Einstein)
That's one of my favourite quotations, at least when it comes to my professional life. It captures what's probably the single most important idea in all of the scientific and engineering disciplines, my own included.
Simplicity.
When it's given any thought at all, simplicity is usually treated as something that's nice to have, but not really essential. This is wrong. In fact, striving for simplicity is so important that it is in my mind synonymous with both striving for perfection and striving for truth. The world is complicated and messy to start with, and the most brilliant ideas, devices, and processes are inevitably the ones that cut through all that complexity and ultimately expose only what is necessary and useful.
Be it an mp3 player, a software product, or an amazingly powerful website, if you want to build something that will be successful, you've got to make simplicity your overriding goal. Always.
Sometimes that's a very hard thing to do, especially when you're trying to build something complicated. That's why a "touch of genius" is sometimes required. Sometimes it even means that you have to take a chance on an entirely new idea, which is the part that requires "courage".
My second favourite quotation on this topic is:
Fools ignore complexity; pragmatists suffer it; experts avoid it; geniuses remove it. (Alan Perlis)
And my third, which is directed specifically at software developers:
... the cost of adding a feature isn't just the time it takes to code it. The cost also includes the addition of an obstacle to future expansion. ... The trick is to pick the features that don't fight each other. (John Carmack)
