

Small is Beautiful - dharmatech
http://synthcode.com/blog/2009/06/Small_is_Beautiful

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drhodes
I'll buy it, save for the music. Simple music is .. simple, `if it sounds
good, it is good`.

Who after a certain age can sit down, turn on the radio and honestly enjoy the
new cookie cutter tunes pushed out of LA? Good music changes the rules. See
the hair standing on your arms - you didn't expect that chord change.

It goes further than that - Take a favorite piece. find a *.mid version of it.
load it into a sequencer, take out all the dynamics and rhythm so the song is
just chord changes, one per measure. It's unbearable. Unlistenable - except
maybe to a student of music theory.

It takes a human ear to bend the sound and forge emotion clearly enough that
the receiving end gleans something from it.

anyways, in music, more nuance is always better.

~~~
tel
I disagree. I think the more primal idea (to be taken with all the requisite
salt) is that you need to make things as simple as possible but no simpler.

[Maybe attributed to Einstein? I'm not sure]

In music "more nuance" often can go to far. I went to a concert a few days ago
that was had a green noise-pop band as an opener. I really enjoyed their
concept, but I wanted to go up there and physically remove some of their
nuance. It was too layered, too complex, too cerebral.

The pivotal thing though is that I liked their concept. I think the things
they were trying to build, and the emotions they were trying to invoke were
great. They just needed to spend more time whittling away to that solid core
and less time playing with loops on their laptops.

So yeah. "If it sounds good, it is good." But that's the kind of statement
that takes "simpler is better" more or less axiomatically.

~~~
drhodes
by nuance, I mean the precision of that moment, not layers of masks, which I
agree take away from the whole thing. -- A slight accent staggered across
multiple instruments, the subtlety and artfulness of the performers. So maybe
resolution would a better term, surely who could argue against too much
resolution?

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gchpaco
One of the best criticisms of the Scheme philosophy is that making the
language so "simple" doesn't actually simplify programs you would want to
write in it--it just pushes the complexity somewhere else. It's still Lisp,
you can extend the language to be suitable, but it requires a surprising
amount of work.

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zimbabwe
I'm curious if anybody has thoughts regarding the work of maximalists. The
only person coming to mind right now is the prolix writer David Foster
Wallace. Is his method of writing entirely flawed? Or are there cases where
being over-the-top is preferable?

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tel
I think if adherence to simplicity prevents you from creating what you want to
create they you're doing it wrong.

~~~
diN0bot
mos def! "as simple as possible" might in fact be quite complex. the mantra is
more of an implementation of how to be direct and efficient.

------
known
Keep it Simple and Scalable.

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nreece
Simple is beautiful.

~~~
stcredzero
Only if it's not too simple. "Too simple" -- subjective -- YMMV.

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utsmokingaces
That is not what she said! (go ahead vote me down)

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cesare
Great post!

