
The Brash Programmers at 37signals Will Tell You: Keep It Simple, Stupid - drm237
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/16-03/mf_signals
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graemeklass
Keeping it simple is actually quite hard. As an engineer, almost every impulse
of mine is to add more, more, more! I'm designing a consumer electronic device
and the trick is to make it look simple to the user by making it quite complex
inside.

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altano
Yeah, I completely agree, but I don't think most people realize what this
means. Deciding to make something simple isn't a choice you make up front.
It's something you fight the whole way through. You have to fight your own
temptations to add instead of subtract, you have to fight the cries of users
who want just one more feature, etc. The simple thing to do will rarely be
obvious

Look at the reaction to arc's release: it made people (who probably had no
intention of building anything in it in the first place) enraged at its
initial lack of unicode support. Imagine that... enraged at the lack of
unicode support in the initial release of a programming language. It's hard to
look at that reaction and realize what it really means: that Paul's probably
on to something.

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henning
"He began by congratulating the nascent Ruby on Rails community (and, by
extension, himself), citing a litany of impressive achievements: 500,000
downloads of the code"

That's about how many downloads PHP gets every couple weeks.

~~~
jraines
I think that was pretty early in the life of Rails though

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mixmax
I think that the attitude of the 37signal guys will eventually backfire, and
it might be about to happen.

Whenever someone comes out guns blazing promoting something as the next coming
of christ (excuse the verbose wording) people will have a tendency to want to
pull them back down to earth, and look for small mistakes that they can use to
do so.

Just the other day on YC news I saw a comment about their book getting real
being "a load of bullshit", and I have seen comments like it elsewhere.

The people that have long term success tend to be much more humble about what
they do. Linus Thorvalds is a good example. We don't want to bring him back
down to earth, because he already has his feet solidly planted there.

I have absolutely nothing against the 37signal guys, just pointing out how
human nature works...

