"Simple Made Easy" - Rich Hickey (2011)
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN treats it as the canonical talk on software complexity, shared constantly and recommended to every programmer regardless of language.
What it is
Rich Hickey's Strange Loop 2011 keynote distinguishing 'simple' (not intertwined) from 'easy' (familiar or near at hand). It argues that software complexity comes from complecting things and that we should pick simple constructs.
Recommended by 14 HN commenters across 14 different months, 2022 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec idunnoman · 2022-05 · on “Learnings from 5 years of tech startup code audits”
As developers, I've come to believe that complexity is the worst sin we commit. Everything we talk about can be traced back to this issue. This is largely due to paying attention to Rich Hickey and learning Clojure. [this video]
Strong rec tincholio · 2022-12 · on “Most(LY Dead) Influential Programming Languages (2020)”
"Simple made easy" [0] by Rich Hickey is a must-watch (even if you never touch Clojure) [0] [this video]
Strong rec alanwreath · 2023-12 · on “Simplicity”
loved the take and re-enforcement of a talk I’ve loved forever by Rich Hickey (famous for being integral to the creation of Clojure among other things) called “Simple Made Easy” [this video] Anyone know of any books that dive deeper into the subject?
Strong rec globular-toast · 2025-01 · on “A better build system for OCaml”
Also the point of software engineering is to take the real complexity that actually exists and you can't get rid of and work out how to write simple code to deal with it. Good software architecture does not include complexity because there is complexity in the business. It manages the complexity with simple code. The trouble is when people say "complex" you don't really know what they mean, though. They often just mean "difficult". Every programmer who wants to use that word needs to watch this: [this video]
Strong rec bad_haircut72 · 2025-05 · on “Lua for Elixir”
You need to watch this [this video] We should try not to make technical judgements based in flippant things like how few lines can someone not even familiar with the ecosystem get a hello world working
Strong rec Lyngbakr · 2025-09 · on “Nine things I learned in ninety years”
I'm sure most folks here have seen the talk, but Rich Hickey's Simple Made Easy # is a superb discussion about this in the context of software. # [this video]
Recommends hinkley · 2023-02 · on “Do the Simplest Thing That Can Possibly Work (2004)”
Obligatory Simple Made Easy link: [this video] Simple is a matter of intuition, and that can't be transmitted to others easily, or with a single class or book. At one particular job we got punished by the business for calling things 'easy' when what we mean is that we understand the problem and all of the steps are (mostly) known. Our boss coached the hell out of us to say 'straightforward' when we meant 'understood', instead of using 'easy' as an antonym for 'quagmire' or 'scary'.
Recommends weatherlight · 2023-06 · on “Teach yourself Computer Science functionally”
Keeping track of all that state in one’s head is hard. I think because of the limitations of FP it’s much easier for new programmers to reason about programs and honestly, learn to program. New developers don’t have to micromanage the computer, the way that the would with an imperative lang. For example, SQL isn’t FP, but think about the number of business analysts whose lives would be more difficult if the had to write imperative programs to fetch data from some sort of data store. I think what in comes down to is simple vs easy. Imperative programming in the very very beginning is easy, buts not simple. Because there’s all this implicit state in your program, as the program grows it become