maybe another quote will help you understand the point
“I'm sorry I wrote such a long letter. I did not have the time to write a short one.” - Abraham Lincoln
The point isnt to have less, its to have as little as possible required to perform the function you want, anything extra is just extra mental energy required to be able to understand it.
Have you ever written something and then vastly reduced it because you realise you are conveying the same thing in different ways, or written software and realised you have made 2 ways to do the same thing? thats all it means.
I get the point, but it's a bad quote. Let me give you an example of a quote that is right on target.
"Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler" -- Albert Einstein
Einstein captures the fact that you need to both add ("as possible") and keep simple. The original quote does not, although apparently some people have a preface to the quote that has a whole bunch of assumptions that make the quote work. I've never seen that preface.
Saint-Exupéry can't have meant it literally; nothing left to take away means zero. On the other hand, since zero is possible, you can make the same trivial argument against Einstein. I suspect that in both cases the original (con)text would be illuminating.
Edit: actually, it appears that Einstein never said this famous Einstein quote. According to Wikiquote, here is what he did say:
It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.
Hardly as catchy! But it does make explicit the qualifier -- without surrendering adequacy -- that applies equally to Saint-Exupéry as well.
The point seems to be that creation is a process that is first additive, then subtractive. Mere agglutination is inferior.
Most people realize exactly what the quote is talking about, since the alternative (removing stuff until you're left with nothing, or with something barely working) makes no sense if the goal is perfection. Part of the appeal of the quote is that you have to make this realization. Just like a joke would lose its appeal if it was preceded by a list of assumptions that would explain the joke.
The problem is that what you describe is not the alternative I've heard before. It's not that you'd remove things to nothing, but rather that you don't add something that is necessary or beneficial, because there's this belief that adding things is bad. I hear this from a lot of college grads, who apparently read a blog that talks about this, or maybe read this quote.
My point is you don't add stupid stuff, but you don't blindly say not to add something, and simply look for things to remove.
I guess I just never met anybody who didn't understand the quote. To me it says: Think very hard about what to add, and think very hard about what to remove. Of course, I realize that those who take the quote literally are not going to think very hard about which features to remove, and I'll agree that you're more likely to succeed with a product that has lots of thoughtlessly added features, than one that has none. :)
It was Pascal who said that in one of his Provincial Letters. The quote is often misattributed to Mark Twain, Cicero, and others, but I've never seen it ascribed to Lincoln. Out of curiosity, do you remember where you heard that?
“I'm sorry I wrote such a long letter. I did not have the time to write a short one.” - Abraham Lincoln
The point isnt to have less, its to have as little as possible required to perform the function you want, anything extra is just extra mental energy required to be able to understand it.
Have you ever written something and then vastly reduced it because you realise you are conveying the same thing in different ways, or written software and realised you have made 2 ways to do the same thing? thats all it means.