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It's easy to make things bigger; it's harder to make things better.

Posted by Dominic Cronin at Mar 01, 2009 01:10 AM |
Doug Crockford recently said: "It's easy to make things bigger; it's harder to make things better.". I agree.

For starters, have a look at Doug Crockford talking about "Javascript - the good parts" over at Google.

Firstly, if you are even remotely interested in the subject, it's worth your attention, but what caught my interest was a throw-away line during the Q&A. Referring to HTML5, Doug said:  "It's easy to make things bigger; it's harder to make things better."

I'm guilty of mangling a famous, but similar quotation myself. For a while now, I've repeatedly said: "It's easy to make things complicated, and it's hard to make things simple". In the back of my mind, I'm sure I recognised that I'd nicked this notion from somewhere else. A quick google turns up the following quotation from Charles Mingus:

"Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.”

Anyway - I liked Doug's twist on this.