Alan Kay, 2015: Power of Simplicity

Not sure which generation you're in and which generation you'd (relatively) consider Alan Key in, but here is a much more principled approach to what the OP is trying to do: ▶ this video The TLDW is that Kay thinks we haven't discovered all the fundamental rules of computing, a la Maxwells Equations for physics. If you are able to figure these out, you can substantially cut down your accidental complexity. FWIW, my unscientific view is that achieving simplicity is really hard and doesn't scale people-wise. Instead of C99 without a bunch of stuff, I'd probably use Scheme to create very dense (lots of bespoke abstractions and idioms) but simple software. That approach works reasonably well, but try onboarding a new developer!

Bret Victor - Inventing on principle link Alan Kay - Power of Simplicity ▶ this video Steve Jobs - Marketing (unveiling Think Different) link Robert Cialdini - On Influence link Peter Thiel - On Zero to One (Notes on Starts Ups or How to Build the Future) link Naval Ravikant on Reading, Happiness, Systems for Decision Making, Habits, Honesty and More (Farnam Street podcast) link Josh Wolfe - On "This is who you are up against" podcast link Richard Feynman - Fun to Imagine link Paul Graham - Startup school (2008) link James Burke - Connections (BBC documentary) <No link> Jim Al-Khalili tells the story of the Atom (BBC) link Elon Musk's 2003 Stanford University Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Lecture link Ken Robinson - Do schools kill creativity? link Paul Stamets on mycology, bioremediation and fungi- Joe Rogan Experience link

I've seen him give this great talk before, but IMO the delivery this time feels rushed and a bit disjointed. That said, the last few minutes summarize his powerful "Gretzky Game" idea so succinctly that they're worth the price of admission alone. I would recommend watching the last 18 seconds of this version (starting at link), internalizing the Gretzky Game slide on the screen, backing it up and watching the fuller explanation in the preceding ~3 minutes (starting at 54:18, link), and then finally watching a different, more expansive version of the talk like this one, given at Qualcomm: ▶ this video Oddly specific advice, I know, but hopefully helpful to somebody.

I'm not Alan, but I saw one of his talks[1] about how they did invent all those things we're using now, which you are very much referring to. What he said was important was to have a big horizon, at least 10 years. Anything less would not do. Then envision what should be possible in that time. "It would be ridiculous if $X wasn't possible in $Y years" and then backtrack on what would technically be required to make that happen. Rinse repeat. He said that with good company support and a good team, you often found yourself delivering at half that time none the less (but again, you should never constrain yourself to that little, or else you will stress towards performing, instead of thinking properly about the problems needing to be solved). Alan: Hope I didn't butcher your message too much :) [1] I think it might be this one, but I honestly haven't checked. See it anyway. It's a good talk. ▶ this video

In his "Power of Simplicity"[1] talk, Alan Kay had a great illustration of this specific phenomenon using astronomy: Before Johannes Kepler had the insight of describing the orbits of the planets with ellipsis, peoples were using the (conceptually simpler) circles which didn't completely match the observed movement of celestial body such as Mars, thus resulted in complicated circle-within-circles orbits to try to model reality. By introducing a more complex basic shape (ellipsis instead of circle) which happened to match the underlying reality more, the overall description of orbits got greatly simplified. It's a phenomenon I've seen a few time in my career so far: that while often there's complex code because there are actually complex hedge case to handle (essential complexity), sometime it's really because the data structure used to model the thing you're handling is slightly missing the mark, making things fit almost-but-not-quite, and many operation done around to handle data can be greatly simplified (if not avoided altogether) by changing the underlying data-structure. (Also, Alan Kay apparently did another talk called "Is it really complex, or did we just make it complicated"[2] that seems pertinent to the thread, though I haven't watch it yet) [1] ▶ this video [2] link