9 hours ago
- The author spent time working on linenoise, a minimal line-editing library, and felt a sense of nirvana from complete control over small, self-contained, useful code.
- Simplicity is valued for its own sake, not just to avoid complexity or over-engineering, but for beauty, understandability, and elegance.
- Small programs can be perfect because constraints foster creativity and avoid the 'it may be better' trap, making what the program does more interesting than what it does not.
- Bill Gates' experience with the Microsoft BASIC interpreter exemplifies perfection in constrained environments where space and time were scarce.
- Today's software is often layered with complexity, but we should still aim for perfection at the large scale, seeing the program as a whole rather than a pile of code.