The top 1% of engineers obsess over simple code

Take their word for it

Listen to any great engineer long enough, and they’ll eventually mention the idea of “simplicity.”
They’ll say things like, “Keep it simple.”
They’ll block your PR because it adds a little dependency.
They’ll yap about how we sent a man to the moon with 64kb of code.

Why do they care so much about this idea?

They care because they’ve felt the pain of complexity.
One day, they decided they were fed up with all the BS.
They just want to build things that work and tune out the noise.

I considered expanding this post by curating data and sharing my anecdotes from building web apps over the last decade. But sometimes it’s better to stay quiet and let the real pros speak. So here’s what the truly great programmers think about simplicity.

The web is basically a very simple idea. Very simple.
— Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the internet

Keep it simple. When in doubt during design, choose the simplest solution.
— Brian Carpenter, early CERN and IBM, CS PhD

We don’t need gigabytes of code. If we can write small programs, we have a chance at understanding them.
— Joe Armstrong, Erlang inventor, CS PhD

C is a very simple language. It’s one of the reasons I enjoy it.
— Linus Torvalds, created Linux kernel & git

An idiot admires complexity, a genius admires simplicity
— Terry Davis, created TempleOS

More

Architectural Principles of the Internet (1958)

TempleOS | Down the Rabbit Hole (2019)

Making reliable distributed systems in the presence of software errors (2003)