SimpleWeblog

Today's Silly Philisophical Thought

Much human effort is devoted to trying to reduce the complexities of the universe - trying to generalize, categorize, create rules applicable to all situations, find reductive explanations for how things work, build layers of abstraction to hide details, specialize to limit what needs to be known. But the complexity can never actually be reduced, only temporarily hidden, making these pursuits ultimately doomed to failure. Of course, the journey may be more important than reaching the final destination - unless I'm just trying to simplify things.

Programmers tend to try to oversimplify things. My theory is that this happens because we spend so much time dealing with such simple, predictable systems that we get used to trying to model everything in such simple forms.