In the last post I focused deeply on the presentation itself, without much reflexion of my own. It is a long presentation, after all. But I'd like to introduce the topic of the title: why make simple code? Simple code is boring, like a game of checkers or tic-tac-toe, where the rules are simple, the number of states limited, and the straightforwardness of it is almost numbing. It's no surprise that people are more and more captivated by the concept of super tic-tac-toe, where you play 10 simultaneous games with extra restrictions. [1]
[1] Wikipedia, Ultimate tic-tac-toe
I have seen some people like the code for the code, as in, they like to use languages' features and to explore all the possibilities, like all the weird interactions that JavaScript has, or how the most recent versions of Java are adding features that existed in C# for years. And although it may be fun to have all these tools to play with, I have often veered towards languages that lack them: C, Go, V, even assembly. A simple project that comes to mind that showed me the potential of simple code was when I wrote drivers for Minix. [2] All the interactions of mouse, keyboard, graphics, were all very simple. It took a lot to write them and to polish all the weird edge cases, but in the end I was able to write a working video game, a shooting side-scroller.
I think what does it for me is the fact that I can focus more on the problem solving and less on the how to structure my code. When you have multiple ways to do something, you wonder the best way to model your problem using code and balance performance, with readability and other parameters. However, I feel that with languages like V there are not as many variations to do the same basic tasks, and so you can just write code.