

How Steve Jobs' Love of Simplicity Fueled A Design Revolution - webwanderings
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/How-Steve-Jobs-Love-of-Simplicity-Fueled-A-Design-Revolution-166251016.html

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overbroad
How Dennis Ritchie's love of simplicity fueled everything that now matters in
computing, including the operating systems and software Steve Jobs used to
"fuel a design revolution".

Apple makes beautiful hardware, but does that amount to simplicity? If the
focus is Apple software, maybe in 1977 it was simple, but today it is anything
but simple. Restrictive? Yes. Simple? No.

When I want simplicity in software I look to New Jersey, not Cupertino.

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nachteilig
Can we please get over the (entirely reasonable) hurt feelings about Ritchie
not getting the attention Jobs did?

Jobs certainly made a lot of contributions to his field, even if they were in
a different area than Ritchie, and it doesn't advance the discourse to
constantly yell "BUT THIS OTHER GUY!" whenever someone is memorializing Jobs.

~~~
overbroad
No hurt feelings. No yelling. Here's my point: real simplicity is the stuff of
Dennis Ritchie. Not Steve Jobs.

As I said, Apple makes beautiful hardware. And you could say they promote a
certain "simplicity" of use. Maybe you could even call Apple hardware
"simple". I don't know. It's an enclosure with a board inside. What I do know
is that once you get to the software side, Jobs is not the guy who should get
credit for "simplicity" of design. That guy should be Dennis Ritchie. Alas,
many journalists will never know this and write about it, because they don't
spend time learning C and UNIX (whereas they do spend time using learning and
Apple products that are built with C and UNIX).

It is the simplicity Ritchie gave us, his design philosophy, that allows so
much to be created, like the software that drives Apple products. Anyone can
create simple things or complex things in software, but we all need to start
with something simple in order to do the building. That something is not the
work of Steve Jobs. It is the work of Dennis Ritchie and colleagues.

If the title did not use the word "simplicity" I would have no comment. Jobs
is a hero of design. But simplicity, to me, is another matter. He is not the
true source. Even the early Apple computers where the software was "simple"
were not the work of Jobs, but of his co-founder, who is not longer part of
Apple.

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JohnBooty
I agree with you: Ritchie's contributions, because they're at the core of so
many things we use (including iOS and OSX) are more influential than Jobs'
contributions (which are pretty darn influential).

However, please re-read the headline you've got an issue with: "How Steve
Jobs' Love of Simplicity Fueled A Design Revolution."

Does the article claim that Jobs' creations were the simplest ever? Or that
his simplicity trumped that of Ritchie? No.

Also note that the article is clearly talking about a _design_ revolution. Did
Ritchie spark a design revolution? No.

(Well, he did, in operating system design. But that's really not the sense of
the word "design" the article is using...)

So I don't understand what your problem is, other than the fact that you don't
like Jobs' contributions a great deal. The claims made by the article are
utterly orthogonal to the importance of Ritchie's work!

~~~
overbroad
"(Well, he did, ... "

That's all I'm saying, really.

I see "simplicity" as orthogonal to the idea that Steve Jobs led a revolution
in design. I see the so-called revolution he led as being beautiful hardware
enclosures, of all sizes. But this is just my opinion. I expect many would
disagree.

I also expect many would not choose to look at these devices past their
enclosures and what they see on the screen. From that limited perspective, it
certainly looks like Jobs made everything simple. (Me, I think Ritchie and his
colleagues did that. They dared to simplify when no one else would. Apple like
many others took the ball and ran with it. But unlike many others, they also
build hardware that looks fantastic... from a marketing standpoint, this is a
winning combination.)

------
mparlane
How Google's Love of Simplicity Fueled A Web Design Revolution

