Having watched Rich's talk yesterday, then Stu's "Simple Ain't Easy"
talk an hour ago, I've been trying to wrap my head around this.
What are the benefits of simplicity in the non-compound sense? Stu
mentioned that often we think of simplicity in terms of counting
things and then sort of brushed that aside, but it seems that chopping
everything apart that can be chopped will inevitably lead to
everything having one element (and therefore the closer to one, the
more "simple," right?). When thinking at that basic level, it becomes
apparent that a lot of things that we might think of as irreconcilably
apple-orangey are in fact just different combinations of the same
primitives---
'("sentences" "aren't" '(\w \o \r \d \s) "but" "they're" "both" "just
chars at the bottom")
This fact (and knowing it) lets you think of sentences and words as
"really just combinations of collections and chars," so you'll be able
to understand how word- or sentence-oriented functions work, while
still retaining the power of dealing with sentences rather than a
billion chars. And if you come up with your own abstraction
(definitialism \G \N \U)
, you can have very fine control over what does and does not go into
it.
So my questions are:
Is this the basic concept Rich & Stu were getting at?
If you're getting down to the bottom of the language, it helps if
there's not much there and you build everything out of them. So isn't
this recent focus on simplicity a sort of intellectual scion to Lisp's
original raison d'etre, Joseph McCarthy's attempt to build a language
out of the smallest number of primitives possible? And SICP/Little
Schemer's focus on taking very very small/basic functions and building
more ever more complex constructs out of them?
As such, wouldn't it be useful to group the core functions by
dependencies on each other, so that one could start with the simple
and just read the source code for things composed with the basic?
I realize I'm asking slightly odd questions, but I'm not sure exactly
what I'm asking. I'm mostly trying to see if I have the feel right,
but you can't really communicate feel by email, so I'm throwing out
things that seem to resonate with the feel and seeing if they stick.
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