It's even worse than it appears.
Saturday June 6, 2020; 9:31 AM EDT
Simplicity is a virtue#
  • This is the problem with JavaScript. #
  • The value of having a standard language is simplicity for newbies. But it takes discipline to remove barriers, instead developers add them. Eventually (maybe now) the weight of the totality will force the whole thing to collapse. #
    • BTW there are many other virtues of simplicity, not just limiting barriers for newbies.#
  • This is a familiar pattern. When I first got into software, I learned C on Unix. Simplicity. Heavily factored. Less is more. Then I looked at the jobs available in the real world, and they had a stack like the one in the cartoon. I went to UCSD Pascal on the Apple II instead.#
  • Why? Because on the Apple II, the Woz machine, less is more. To display a character just write it to a location in the machine's memory. Again, a fresh slate. How many fresh slates would it take to get to networked apps? Lots. How many were actually needed if we had discipline?#
  • One. But you have to have a culture where we only add features if we're adding functionality. I have a motto for this. "Two ways of doing something is worse than one, no matter how much better the second way is."#
  • I've had to say this many times over the decades of my career, as other programmers added complexity to an already-too-complex system. JavaScript *was* a good idea. Now it is a huge hairball because programmers keep wanting to solve the same problems over and over.#

© 1994-2020 Dave Winer.

Last update: Saturday June 6, 2020; 10:31 AM EDT.

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