Shaving with Ockham – Jim Weirich’s brilliant presentation on simplicity
Jim Weirich gave a brilliant presentation called Shaving with Ockham this year at MountainWest RubyConf 2008. His premise was K.I.S.S – Keep it Simple Stupid. The presentation is both entertaining and educational. And at the very least, it servers as an excellent introduction to LISP.
Weirich takes the audience for a walk through the various programing languages that he has used over his career. These include LISP, FORTH, Erlang, and something resembling Java/JSP. He then extracts a few simple rules from each of the first three languages that make them simple and very powerful. These elements are a small core, simple rules, and powerful abstractions.
Along with showing simplicity, Weirich also analyzes why programmers make complicated, complex programs. He suggests that it because we like to solve complicated, complex problems with complex solutions. We get so intent on solving a problem that we do not look around to see if there is a simple solution.
The presentation ends with Ockham’s razor: “entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem”, or “entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity”. Also known as, “all other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best”. This is definitely a video that every programmer should watch.