> La perfection est atteinte non pas lorsqu'il n'y a plus rien à ajouter, mais lorsqu'il n'y a plus rien à retirer.
> Perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove.
On the same theme:
> the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience
- Einstein
> I would have written a shorter letter, but did not have the time
- Pascal
> Simplicity is a great virtue but requires hard work to achieve and education to appreciate, and, to make matters worse, complexity sells better.
- Dijkstra.
Airman's Odyssey ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
And I appreciated the lovely quote by Einstein, about "irreducible basic elements". And Dijkstra on complexity. I often think of "finding the right primitives" in my work, and it's great to see the idea expressed so well by different people.
Maybe it's just the crowd that gets on HN, but it seems a lot of developers think much more highly of themselves than is strictly necessary.