How to approach perfection — in life, in programming, in doing any job? Not by piling feature on top of feature, adding fixes to correct previous mistakes, building extensions upon extensions in a rococo nightmare ... but rather, by removing redundancies, cleaving off flaws, resolving conflicts; by unifying special cases and expressing them in terms of underlying general principles; by relentlessly pursuing simplicity of design while maintaining extensibility, openness to growth; by identifying fundamental sources of power and tapping them at their roots.

Monday, May 24, 1999 at 21:04:37 (EDT) = 1999-05-24

TopicProgramming - TopicPhilosophy

In the book on computer game design, "The Art of Computer Game Programming" by Chris Crawford (check title please!), Crawford at one point expressed his disgust with programmers who started with a simple structure and started piling junk "(they call them features)" atop it. These 'mud heap' programmers confused complexity with originality, "intricacy with insight."

RadRob , Feb 18, 2002

(correlates: FlashInThePan, SolublesInsolubles, MudAndCrystals, ...)