Simplicity – The Holy Grail Of Software Development

Posted by Brooks in Misc, User Experience on Jul 23rd, 2008 | 3 comments

Simplicity. A word to live by. An unending quest. The holy grail of software. As software makers our raison d’être is making complex tasks easy. We’re back to that elusive word–simplicity. In a beautiful twist of irony it turns out that even thinking about simplicity involves a great deal of complexity. Enter John Maeda’s Ten Laws. I’ve read Maeda’s laws in the past, but as I’ve matured as a software developer they resonate more and more with each passing day. Here are a few of my favorites:

maeda_reduce.png

maeda_simplicity.png

maeda_complexity.png



3 Responses to “ “Simplicity – The Holy Grail Of Software Development”

  1. Link Love for August 10 - Laurel Plum Online says:
    August 10, 2008 at 10:09 pm

    [...] Simplicity (read even if you are not a software developer) from http://www.brooksandrus.com [...]

  2. Bookmarks about Development says:
    August 28, 2008 at 2:15 pm

    [...] – bookmarked by 1 members originally found by firsttiger on 2008-08-12 Simplicity – The Holy Grail Of Software Development http://www.brooksandrus.com/blog/2008/07/23/simplicity-the-holy-grail-of-software-development/ – [...]

  3. Alex says:
    April 13, 2010 at 11:40 pm

    I’m curious, is there a list of criteria, which can formalize the value of a code, for example:
    - correctness
    - simplicity
    - consistency
    - reliability
    - effectiveness
    - testability
    - usability… ???
    Somebody calls it best practices.

Leave a Reply