Bruce Eckel is trying to cultivate bloggingas a genre for expressing ideas that aren't yet complete thoughts. "I now believe there are three modes of written communication: books, articles, and ideas. The first two I have long experience with, but I lack a medium for ideas. "
Eckel draws an interesting connection between initial simplicity -- getting something out quickly -- and elegant simplicity, which takes a lot of work to prune a complex expression to a simple form. They aren't the same thing at all, but getting material out into the world helps give you the feedback that lets you refine and polish.
What is the balance between simplicity and expedience? "Do the simplest thing that could possibly work" is certainly not saying "do the most elegant thing" because the goal is to get something working, without too much effort, so that you can try it out and see if it solves any portion of the problem. "Trying it out" is what will produce the valuable information that can be fed back into the next iteration, and will also begin to tell you what's most important about the problem.Posted by alevin at January 17, 2004 02:42 PM | TrackBack
I wrote something similar long ago(Nov 8 2000):
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Still, I've become increasingly of the mindset that blogs are an important new phenomenon. I think there is a new form of communication/publishing taking place. It's not necessarily about annotated links, or diary entries, or whatnot. It's simply about putting form to thought and getting it out there. The omnipresence of the internet allows for the publishing of thought pretty much *as it occurs*. This is new. This is exciting. People all over the world, going about their business, have something occur to them. In moments they can simply *put it out there*. Whatever "it" is. This is a notion that seems obvious when you look at it, but I don't think the blogging phenomenon has ever been discussed in this way.
Less is definitely more. The other place where simplification has been a major theme in recent years is software design process. 'Extreme Programming' being the original set of fairly radical ideas for streamlining code production. Even those who don't fully agree with the whole thing see value in parts of it (hybrids brand themselves as 'Agile Development').
As for 'put it out there to get feedback so you can refine & polish'... sounds like the bazaar/open source development model to me.
Both of which point to a similarity between developing and refining code and developing and refining ideas. Hrm. Is anyone really suprised by this?
--pj