Compromised Visions Are Superior

&gt; Computing used to be constrained as well. I love this story about the development of the Atari 2600 game Pitfall. Most of the game&#x27;s design was a clever set of choices to get something fun working on the limited hardware designed to run Pong.<p>Has anyone actually tried to play Pitfall! lately? It is, like, a pretty bad and un-fun game, doesn’t hold up as well as pong or pac-man at all. I think it was impressive at the time because it was at the limit of what the system could do.<p>It seems like a counter example to the thesis of the piece IMO. I get the idea that constraints can become part of the design and you get interesting ideas. But in this case, Pitfall! just does it’s best to mitigate the constraints and becomes a worse version of every successor that was made after the limitations were cleared.<p>&gt; We will only have settings that fit on one screen.<p>But, like, please don’t actually remove all the setting, that’s annoying.

Surprised he used the Jaws example when the clearest case of what he is talking about is what I refer to as the Tragedy of George Lucas.<p>The first star wars trilogy, but especially the first movie, was extremely budget constrained to the point where Lucas had to exchange his own salary for merchandising rights (an accidentally brilliant move), and they did the best with what they had. decades later, he decides that now he has the budget to make them the way he <i>really</i> wanted to, he goes and makes major changes with CGI and destroys the original copies, which can only really be found in unaltered digital form on underground sites.<p>Then the prequels come and it&#x27;s very obvious he had unlimited budget and creative control, and the result just simply was not even close to good, or at the very least not even close to the magic of the original trilogy. Giving creators unlimited control seems to have great capacity to end very poorly.

&gt; Unfortunately, I don’t know how to convince others, especially those above me, that if I do less of the features they want, the product will be better, despite trying.<p>I think it boils down to the fact that this is nowhere near being an absolute irreducible truth. Sometimes if you don&#x27;t do the features I want, the product will suck and I&#x27;m getting another product from someone who has something other than a ruthless asceticism as their only core value.

This reminds me of the excellent talk &quot;Constraints Liberate, Liberties Constrain&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=GqmsQeSzMdw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=GqmsQeSzMdw</a> that is more about doing the programming rather than planning it as in the article, but with a similar approach.

I&#x27;ve always felt that engineering can best be described as &quot;the art of compromise.&quot; The more you understand and embody this the more success your engineering projects will have.<p>This is very easy to achieve in &quot;physical&quot; engineering disciplines. It&#x27;s remained an elusive idea in software engineering for whatever reasons.

Reasonable general advice. It&#x27;s important though to evaluate the quality of the constraints we submit to. There is both incredible freedom and oppression in constraint. Hopefully the constraints you choose push in the former direction.

I kinda had similar thought: best inventions are made under constraints. You aren&#x27;t going write a responsive app if framerate isn&#x27;t a constraint. You aren&#x27;t going optimize download sizes if you assume everyone has multi Gb Internet connection.<p>I also believe, but i have no proof, that setting limits on the scale of a country, will provide tangible benefits : for ex, assign a maximum allowed power consumption increase per year, and let the market figure it out.

The idea of being more creative by being limited reminds me of the journaling style solo TTRPG&#x27;s.<p>I like to dabble in fiction writing, but give me a blank piece of paper and I freeze. With the journaling solo TTRPG&#x27;s you are essentially given a list of prompts which are quite often set in a predefined world. Somehow by being forced to write a story with these prompts I can write so much more and far quicker then I could by staring at my own piece of paper.

&quot;The system gets the software it deserves&quot; is a true statement, in a beautifully concise formulation.

To me, this boils down to the challenge. It&#x27;s far more rewarding (for our brains) to work under some constraints. This boosts our creativity.

Small gossip – Eric Normand is Mark Normand&#x27;s brother (stand-up comedian).