Last week Joel Spolsky wrote a blog post entitled The Duct Tape Programmer where he praises developers who favor simple programming practices to complex ones. This blog post strongly resonated with me and made me recall some related thoughts on complexity and solving problems in software projects. Some key excerpts from his which I'll use as a jumping off point are below

Jamie Zawinski is what I would call a duct-tape programmer. And I say that with a great deal of respect. He is the kind of programmer who is hard at work building the future, and making useful things so that people can do stuff.

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Duct tape programmers are pragmatic. Zawinski popularized Richard Gabriel’s precept of Worse is Better. A 50%-good solution that people actually have solves more problems and survives longer than a 99% solution that nobody has because it’s in your lab where you’re endlessly polishing the damn thing. Shipping is a feature. A really important feature. Your product must have it. One principle duct tape programmers understand well is that any kind of coding technique that’s even slightly complicated is going to doom your project. Duct tape programmers tend to avoid C++, templates, multiple inheritance, multithreading, COM, CORBA, and a host of other technologies that are all totally reasonable, when you think long and hard about them, but are, honestly, just a little bit too hard for the human brain.



The urge the reduce the complexity of the tools used to solve software problems is one that every software developer should share. However even more important is reducing the complexity of the actual solutions that are delivered to your customers at the end of the day. End users can't tell if you used complicated C++ techniques like template metaprogramming and mixins to build the application. They can tell when your application fails to solve their actual problems in a straightforward way or is so late to ship due to project delays that they lose interest in waiting for you to solve their problems.

There are many famous and everyday examples of this culture of complexity in software projects which are eventually trumped by solutions that solve 80% of the problem in a simple way. My favorite example is contrasting the World Wide Web invented by Tim Berners-Lee with Project Xanadu as envisioned by Ted Nelson. Today the WWW is used by over a billion people to enrich their lives in myriad ways on a daily basis and has created hundreds of billions dollars in value by minting an entire new industry. Project Xanadu is a sad footnote spoken about in hushed tones by fans of hypertext who bewail the success of the Web and how it has forced us to settle for less (i.e. Worse Is Better).

If you aren't familiar with Project Xanadu you can think of it as a networked system of hyperlinked documents and media just like the WWW which had to satisfy the following seventeen rules

Every Xanadu server is uniquely and securely identified. Every Xanadu server can be operated independently or in a network. Every user is uniquely and securely identified. Every user can search, retrieve, create and store documents. Every document can consist of any number of parts each of which may be of any data type. Every document can contain links of any type including virtual copies ("transclusions") to any other document in the system accessible to its owner. Links are visible and can be followed from all endpoints. Permission to link to a document is explicitly granted by the act of publication. Every document can contain a royalty mechanism at any desired degree of granularity to ensure payment on any portion accessed, including virtual copies ("transclusions") of all or part of the document. Every document is uniquely and securely identified. Every document can have secure access controls. Every document can be rapidly searched, stored and retrieved without user knowledge of where it is physically stored. Every document is automatically moved to physical storage appropriate to its frequency of access from any given location. Every document is automatically stored redundantly to maintain availability even in case of a disaster. Every Xanadu service provider can charge their users at any rate they choose for the storage, retrieval and publishing of documents. Every transaction is secure and auditable only by the parties to that transaction. The Xanadu client-server communication protocol is an openly published standard. Third-party software development and integration is encouraged.

Reading this list is like going through a list of places where World Wide Web fails. Rule #14 which implies every document on the network is redundantly backed up in disparate locations so they can always be is something the WWW doesn't do today which is why we have broken links and 404s all the time. Rule #9 implies that not only is copyright respected and tracked throughout the system but there is even a micropayment platform built in. All the discussions on micropayments saving newspapers would be moot if Project Xanadu ruled the world since it would have existed from day one. Rule #16 on transactions being secure and auditable sounds like Nirvana in today's world of botnets, malware and phishing scams which plague the Web.

Yet despite the fact that the forty year old Project Xanadu is a more compelling vision than were we are today it failed and Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web succeeded. In practical terms, Project Xanadu was trying to solve too many complex problems in a v1 product. In contrast, Tim Berners-Lee focused on the most valuable problems to solve for end users which was sharing documents and media with anyone on the Internet and punted on a bunch of the hard problems that would require a more controlled and tightly coupled network as well as a ton of more code. Tim Berners-Lee solved less than half the problems Project Xanadu set out to solve but has changed the world immeasurably for billions of people by providing simple solutions to complex problems and running away from trying to create complex solutions to complex problems.

The bottom line is that a lot of the time it's OK to create a solution that solves 80% of the problem. Always remember that shipping is a feature.

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