The Ultimate Principle of Simplicity
It has been interesting going back to work and getting up to speed with my new team’s systems, some of which are third-party and others are Very Much Invented Here. I find myself thinking about this quotation a lot:
It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove.
The author of Le Petit Prince was an aviator and was referring to the engineering of the modern aeroplane but he could just as easily have been talking about computer software. As I wrote in this blog over a decade ago,
When we write code, particularly code for an already-solved problem, we are not really contributing a solution but adding to the problem!
–Part of the problem, or part of the solution?
Less is more.