Simple Made Easy

by Rich Hickey (1h)

photo of Rich Hickey giving the talk 'Simple Made Easy'

# Notes

03:20 Simple is objective and means lack of interleaving.

05:16 Easy is relative and means familiar or near our capabilities.

09:40 We are infatuated with the notion of programmer convenience focusing on the construction, which is irrelevant for users.

15:06 We can reason about the world and programs without category theory.

15:42 What’s true of every bug found in the field? It passed the type checker and all the tests.

Programmers know the value of everything and the cost of nothing.

— Adaptation from Alan Perlis 27:36

49:07 Programming is not about typing. It’s about thinking.

49:30 Abstraction means to draw away, not hiding complexity.

Note: Rich gave this talk multiple times. I removed a shorter and slightly different version called “Simplicity Matters” from this list.

a favourite talk shared by Max