KISS (Keeping It Simple and Sloppy)

Adam Bosworth, formerly of Microsoft and BEA and now at Google, gave a talk at ISCOC04 about KISS (Keeping It Simple and Sloppy). The transcript is an excellent read. One good quote to motivate you:

… software which is flexible, simple, sloppy, tolerant, and altogether forgiving of human foibles and weaknesses turns out to be actually the most steel cored, able to survive and grow while that software which is demanding, abstract, rich but systematized, turns out to collapse in on itself in a slow and grim implosion.

Adam goes on to provide examples of “sloppy” systems that succeeded where rigid systems failed. The examples are good but I take issue with one of them:

Consider the spreadsheet. It is a protean, sloppy, plastic, flexible medium that is, ironically, the despair of all accountants and auditors because it is virtually impossible to reliably understand a truly complex and rich spreadsheet. Lotus corporation (now IBM), filled with Harvard MBA’s and PhD’s in CS from MIT, built Improv. Improv set out “to fix all this”. It was an auditors dream. It provided rarefied heights of abstraction, formalisms for rows and columns, and in short was truly comprehensible. It failed utterly, not because it failed in its ambitions but because it succeeded.

First off, I don’t remember anyone with a Harvard MBA or MIT CS PhD on the Improv team. Second, I think Adam’s view oversimplifies the reasons for Improv’s demise. It’s a fair assessment when viewed from the outside but reality was more complicated than that.

But that’s really a nit. The rest of Adam’s talk is terrific.

Also worth reading is Sriram Krishnan’s followup to Adam’s article, Tyranny of the geeks