Grug came up a week ago in a Philosophy of Software Design submission's comments. I thought the commentary was pretty good. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38011938 > I feel the exact same about grug. I don't think people actually agree on what's simple, so it's pretentious to pretend your "simple" is the obvious one that a caveman would agree with. Simple/simplicity is often one of the most complex things to di…
That’s a very good point. I feel, however, that the main idea is that bad philosophy is what ultimately fuels complexity. The grug brain philosophy is simplicity at all costs, unless absolutely unavoidable. The big brain philosophy as grug sees it is reusability at all costs, unless absolutely unavoidable. The issue with this philosophy is that it tends to lock in first generation design choices and makes iteration m…
I agree.
A common approach to simple is “just start with the first thing that pops into your head and see how far you get.” I guess we could describe that as “simple to think of.”
A far less common approach to simple is “think through the whole problem, then remove everything that you don’t need.” This is what I’d call “a simple solution”, but note that it takes a lot more work to find it.