On Friday, October 27, 2017, Steve Nickolas <usotsuki@buric.co> wrote:

On Fri, 27 Oct 2017, Clem Cole wrote:

And to simplify that ... s/operating systems/SW/

Well, yeah. Has M$ Word even really gotten much in the way of new features since version 6 in the early 1990s? But it's sure gotten bigger... And that seems the way of software in general.

We don't even have to look at M$. We can look at our own backyard and find the same pattern. UNIX in the 70s was small and simple, the same way Linux kernel was small and simple in the early 90s. Now it is a bloated, fat monster.

It seems that it is very hard to avoid bloat in the software world in the long run. Most people don't care, but the original UNIX and C, Plan 9 and Go projects could be one of the few I can think of that really cared about minimalism. It is interesting to note that they were built by the very same group of people.

Minimalism is the main word here. If you read personal website of Charles Forsyth then you will notice he mentions it explicitly as his "overarching theme". That is the secret key to beauty and elegance in the software world.

--Andy