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Added 4 Aug 2026InfoQfiled under Products That Last

Simple and easy are not the same word

A note on Simple Made Easy by Rich Hickey, published on InfoQ.

The definitions are the whole talk. Simple means one fold, a thing that is not interleaved with other things. Easy means near at hand, familiar, quick to reach for. They are unrelated properties, and confusing them is how codebases get into trouble while everyone is making sensible decisions.

The uncomfortable part is that easy is measured against you, right now. A framework you know well is easy. A pattern your team already uses is easy. Neither says anything about whether the result is untangled, and the cost of tangling shows up months later when a change to one thing requires understanding four.

What makes it useful rather than philosophical is that it gives you a question to ask in review that is not about preference: what else does this now have to know about? A dependency added for convenience that couples two previously independent parts has traded simple for easy, and the trade is usually invisible in the pull request.

It is a talk about Clojure by a Clojure author, and almost none of it is about Clojure. Watch it once a year.

This is the thinking behind defending the plain version in code review.

Read the original ↗ architecture · code-quality · maintainability
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