Simple made easy

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy

Rich Hickey's presentation which received a standing ovation from Dr. Sussman.

Every intertwining add burden to our brain
Every bug was written by someone, compiled cleanly, and passed all the tests.
Focusing on ease, you will get complexity that kills you
If you go for simple, you start slow, and eventually go faster
OO is easy, but yields complexity
Incidental complexity—incidental is Latin for "your fault"
We can learn more things, but can't get smarter
Simple doesn't mean less parts. Sometimes we need to have more parts to make every part simple
State/Object is complex; Values are simple
Methods are complex; functions/namespaces are simple
Variables are complex; managed refs are simpler
Inheritance/switches are complex; polymorphism à la carte is simple
Syntax is complex; data is simple
Loops are complex; set functions are simple
Actors are complex; queues are simple
ORM is complex; declarative data manipulation is simple
I did years and years of stateful programming, and it sucked
Nothing makes state simple
If you take two things from this talk: the first is simple vs. easy; the second is that you do not need the complex tools
Use only
values
functions
namespaces
data
polymorphism à la carte
set functions
queues
learn SQL
rules
We create complex data structures around data rather than dealing with data directly. Use a map rather than defining a type
You have to analyse the problem and make a decision on the result
Abstraction should separate What, Who, How, When/Where, and Why
Information is simple. The only thing you can do is ruin it
Leave data alone
It's your fault if you don't have a simple system
Guardrails don't yield simplicity
Develop your sensibility around disentanglement
All reliability tools (tests, etc.) doesn't matter