E.W.Dijkstra: Simplicity is a great virtue ... complexity sells better.

Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.

Another good quote is;

To which we may add that, the less the new science is understood, the higher these expectations. We all know, how computing is now expected to cure all ills of the world and more, and how as far as these expectations are concerned, even the sky is no longer accepted as the limit.

The analogy raises, for instance, the questions which current computer-related research will later be identified as computing's alchemy, and whether this identification can be speeded up,

Describes the current ML/AI craze perfectly.

Whoever it was, I think the same holds for software: creating simple software is harder than making complex software.

On the foolishness of "natural language programming".

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667...

In back office / cloud / IT type stuff I wonder if complex things like Kubernetes win over simpler approaches precisely because they are more expensive and labor intensive. As a result of being labor intensive they pick up more users who after investing in climbing their learning curve become champions. Simpler or more “fire and forget” systems require less labor and so win fewer converts.

I'm pretty much the polar opposite of djikstra, all application almost no theory, but he was a real one...

Personally, I'd prefer if everything he represented was properly demarcated by 'mathematics', leaving its complex, material, physical realisation to 'computer science'. The failure to do this has indoctrinated a generation of people into a mysticism I'm not found of, to say the least.

Honestly that sounds pretty nice.

The hard sciences seem to lead to more real-world applications quicker. Software science only seems to advance when used by tech companies to sell ads. But there's not that many applications for software to perform that function, so there's not really that many material improvements.

They keep coming up with new ways to advertise (who'd have imagined an interactive navigation map that advertises burgers?). But the computer technology that controls the lives of the common man has not progressed much past the 90s. The hardware has gotten denser, sure, but the software has bloated at the same pace, without providing a significantly improved or different user experience. It's still just clicking windows and paging through media, with basically the same software working the same way, just re-written 20 times over.

These new forms of generative AI certainly have the capability to sort out information more efficiently, and skip a lot of the more manual programming required to provide features. But AI was never necessary to take a prompt and turn it into an action, as all the car nav systems in the world have shown for years. Yet for some reason I can't quite fathom, only cars have audible user interfaces? And we traded tactile interfaces for glass screens... because it's prettier?

I don't care about simplicity or complexity, any more than I care about how antibiotics are produced. I care that I can take a pill and get better.

Similarly, it would be great if it were just a little bit easier to do simple things, like check my bank statement, without worrying about "cyber threats", or jumping through hoops when the next password replacement fails, or having to upgrade my app for the 3rd time this week before I'm allowed to check the bank statement, or having to click through offers for yet another credit card, or navigate a complex tree of "features" that varies from app to app, and month to month. I just want to read my god damn statement.

I don't know if the philosophy of producing this technology will ever be resolved. But I've stopped caring. The state of computer science today is, I've given up hoping for something advanced. I'll settle for something that isn't painful.

Please consider using the original title: is "On the nature of Computing Science."

The essay is about much more than simplicity versus complexity.

...and compare it to say, Paul Graham's 'the other road ahead' https://www.paulgraham.com/road.html (2001)