Re: Just one more anecdote

Marshall Spight wrote:
> dawn wrote:
> >
> > You are using "the simplest model is the best model" and I don't buy
> > it, although I don't dismiss it as useless.
>
> I just have to pop in here and say that out of all the design
> principles
> I've ever picked up or articulated myself, I put Simplicity as the
> most important.

The simplest design might be based on a more complicated underlying model, right?

> A good design is one that meets all the requirements,
> a better design is one that meets all the requirements as is but will
> not if you remove even one design element. The best design is the
> smallest design.

I don't know why this popped into my head, but you statement reminded me of the college foreign student from Turkey who was at my house with a group of foreign students when I was 15. I gave him a tour of our middle America, middle class house. At the end of the tour he said that he found our house absolutely fascinating because it had everything one would need in a house and yet it was so tiny. His house had the gardens in the courtyard in the middle with the pools rather than in a back yard and the rooms were all huge with high ceilings, etc.

I suspect I would have willingly traded houses at that point in spite of my house having the smallest design. :-)

But, yes, I do accept your point and agree to a large extent regarding design. But just because a system could be implemented using paper and pencil, a much, much simpler set of tools than a computer, does not mean that is a better idea.

I do employ this "simple is best" approach in the design of a data model, avoiding adding in "maybe we will want this data captured in the future" attributes.

>
> I don't know whether this is a good principle for cosmological
> contemplations, but it's sure a good one for designing software.

If one system does the exact same thing as another, but the first is simpler, it might not be equally scalable. If they are fully equal in what they do, what they can do, and how much it costs to do it, and one is simpler, then, yes, the simpler one is better. I've never seen the tradeoffs come down to such a obvious choice, however. cheers! --dawn

>
> Marshall
Received on Tue Aug 02 2005 - 06:32:59 CEST