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Sebastian Ärleryd

3y ago

Programmer in the Video Games industry. Passionate about Workflows and Tools. Writes about Productivity, Knowledge Management, and Software Engineering.

In Software, simple is better than perfect.

Yes. Better. More perfect.

🧵

Simple is short code.

Simple is easy to read code.

Simple is obvious code.

Simple is code that is boring and just gets the job done.

Simple is easy to understand, adapt, and change.

Perfect code produces a perfect result. This is complicated and hard to understand. Here live special cases. Perfect solutions are very specific to the problem and hard to change. Perfect code is stiff code. Perfect code is hard to debug and maintain.

Simple is better than perfect. Simple will produce better results faster. Simple will be less buggy.

Why?

It all comes down to the fact that Programming turns into Software Engineering when you add time.

Simple will be more perfect than perfect because you can adapt.

In the long run, you need to keep adding features.

In the long run, you have to solve bugs that pop up.

In the long run, you must build upon existing code to reach new heights.

In the long run, you must optimize code that is too slow.

This is easy with simple solutions.

Therefore simple will in the end have more features, be faster, be less buggy, and lead to better products.

Because you will make it so. Because you could.

Perfect solutions stay perfect for that problem. They are hard to change. Slow to write. Hard to debug. Hard to optimize for performance.

Write simple. Don't write perfect.

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