Jonathan Martin
Archive for 2013
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Kissing Simplicity Goodbye
~ by Jonathan Martin
Simplicity concerns concepts and divisions more that it does lines of code. But you probably didn’t hear that from Kelly Johnson.
Keep it simple stupid.
The principle emphasizes that, contrary to what an average homegrown hacker might presume, complication isn’t a sign of brilliance: it signals a lack of investment. It shows the inability to break down and sift through the aspects of a problem domain to arrive at a solution that could be explained to a coworker in a couple sentences.
The sad reality is no tool can assess (or automate) simplicity; CodeClimate can’t tell me how well my knowledge boundaries are defined. Most of the time it does an impressive job at guessing through the causal relationship: a simpler model often yields simpler code. But not always.
That’s what you as a developer are employed to do: to keep it truly simple, not just for stupid people.