Why We Build Simple Software

>My car is simple

No, it isn't. It is extremely complicated, containing two different mechanisms for propulsions, complex mechanical linkages for those propulsion mechanisms and steering, a deep web of electrical components including large software projects, augmenting the driving characteristics and providing essential safety features and much, much more.

It was painstakingly designed by thousands of engineers, who tried to take everything into account and to present to you something which to you "feels right", although you have zero idea about why it does.

Calling such a thing simple is completely ridiculous. As if the thousands of engineers were just superfluous and you could design a car by slapping together some components and have it work flawlessly. This is a highly integrated system, where a change to any single one component can influence all other components in very strange ways. That it is reliable, is not because it is simple, it is reliable because someone else has dealt with that complexity for you and spent an enormous amount of effort to get it right.

To be honest the arrogance of software developers is astounding. Looking at an enormously complicated project, which had to take into account a vast array of requirements and had to deal with all the complexity of mechanical, electrical and software systems working together and then going "that is simple, we should do simple things like they do", because the engineers working on it managed to hide all of that from you, speaks of so much arrogance. Just open up the hood and look at it. Look at it.

> I drive a 2020 Toyota Corolla Hybrid,... it is simple.

No car is simple and certainly not hybrid cars. Just consider the electronics: think 100+ ECUs communicating using dozens of different protocols over hundreds meters of wires, and millions of lines of code running on a diverse set of processors.

I agree with the sentiment of the blog, but it doesn't present a very compelling argument. Just relies on authority rather than evidence or logical reasoning. For a more impactful and well-reasoned discussion on this topic checkout "Simple Made Easy" by Rich Hickey (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxdOUGdseq4)

> I’ve driven it 40,000 miles and I’ve never had to take it in for maintenance

That car should have been in for at least 4 oil changes (maintenance) in that mileage -- more if not using synthetic oil.

Zawinski's Law: "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."

Back in the day, we had these things called email clients. A good example was Eudora from Qualcomm (yes, the Snapdragon company). It was simple, straightforward, and handled sending, receiving, and managing emails with aplomb -- and nothing else.

Then Microsoft came along and combined email, contacts, and calendaring in one application -- Outlook. And ate the lunch of all the non-web-based email clients out there. To this day Outlook is pretty much table stakes for working in a corporate environment, especially since all corporate IT has to do is deploy Exchange to handle all three tasks from the server side. And Eudora is literally a museum piece; the software's source was made available as a historic artifact and the trademark rights were transferred to the Computer History Museum.

"Simplicity" in software is a red herring. You need to read your market and find out what your customers actually want, what will make life easier and more convenient for your actual users. Sometimes people actually want the car that grills hamburgers, the cellphone with a built-in camera, the email client that also does contacts and calendaring.

Comparing a "boring" 2020 vintage car to simple software is insane since that boring car is full of complex software, not to mention it's a network of at least 40 separate computers. A 2020 model probably has a bus firewall or gateway as well.

I get what the author is trying to say but there's a fundamental difference between "complexity" and "complicated".

Life is complex (and often quite complicated). Most actual solutions that people need are solving complex problems. You can't really solve complex problems with simple software, you'll just end up building a complex (and often complicated) web of simple solutions.

Our job as software engineers is to prevent the software from getting complicated, managing the complexity such that it's able to morph as the users needs change over time.

To fit the article, adding a grill to a car would be complicating the car, not making it more complex.

> I drive a 2020 Toyota Corolla Hybrid, which I bought used in Spring 2021. It has four wheels (well, five if you count the steering wheel), airbags, a stereo, and it gets 55 miles to the gallon. Unless it’s hiding something, I think that’s about it.

Thats a pretty big strawman? This 'simple' car took thousands of people and many millions or billions of direct r&d. It has many more features than what was listed and it is fundamentally a complex beast. Reliability =/= simplicity.

Whatever software product your trying to sell that was build by a team of a half-dozen and mostly used off the shelf components is not a good comparison for the complexity of a car.

> In the last three years, I’ve driven it 40,000 miles and I’ve never had to take it in for maintenance.

I'm sorry, what?

Please don't do this, people. It ruins completely good engines and the poor guy who gets this car with high mileage will be the one with the grenade on his hands.

Now with the software part. Keeping the software as "human sized" as possible and the ones who build it on the hook for support ( cheap paid support, not the main source of income of the contract ) is 80% of the work in order to keep complications in check.

Either way time and reality will weed out the ones who as "fancy" and "advanced" they are, nobody will have the money or patience to deal with them. The only unfortunate thing about this is how long it takes to play out and the victims it makes along the way until it succumbs under its own expensive weight.

Why is there no spare wheel in that car?