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Obvious is good. Optimization can come later. Cleverness is for when you are out of options.

The programming landscape 30+ years ago and its severely constrained resources strongly biased our idea of "good software" in favor of cleverness. I think we can say we know better now. Having been responsible for picking up someone else's clever code myself.



> severely constrained resources

Energy is a resource. Mobile computing devices demonstrate this constraint already. I predict that what is old will become new again.


Do we? I feel the layers of abstraction are quite extensive now. They are anything but simple.


(Good) Abstraction is there to hide complexity. I don't think it's controversial to say that software has become extremely complex. You need to support more spoken languages, more backends, more complex devices, etc.


The most complex thing to support is peoples' resumes. If carpenters were incentivized like software devs are, we'd quickly start seeing multi-story garden sheds in reinforced concrete because every carpenters dream job at Bunkers Inc. pays 10x more.




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