Small is Beautiful

I'll buy it, save for the music. Simple music is .. simple, `if it sounds good, it is good`.<p>Who after a certain age can sit down, turn on the radio and honestly enjoy the new cookie cutter tunes pushed out of LA? Good music changes the rules. See the hair standing on your arms - you didn't expect that chord change.<p>It goes further than that - Take a favorite piece. find a *.mid version of it. load it into a sequencer, take out all the dynamics and rhythm so the song is just chord changes, one per measure. It's unbearable. Unlistenable - except maybe to a student of music theory.<p>It takes a human ear to bend the sound and forge emotion clearly enough that the receiving end gleans something from it.<p>anyways, in music, more nuance is always better.

One of the best criticisms of the Scheme philosophy is that making the language so "simple" doesn't actually simplify programs you would want to write in it--it just pushes the complexity somewhere else. It's still Lisp, you can extend the language to be suitable, but it requires a surprising amount of work.

I'm curious if anybody has thoughts regarding the work of maximalists. The only person coming to mind right now is the prolix writer David Foster Wallace. Is his method of writing entirely flawed? Or are there cases where being over-the-top is preferable?

Keep it Simple and Scalable.

Simple is beautiful.

That is not what she said! (go ahead vote me down)

Great post!