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2023-01-21
Simplicity can mean different things to different people.
I particularily like this one:
A simple solution has elegance. It is the result of exacting effort to understand the real problem and is recognized by its compelling sense of rightness.
Charles H. More, Inventor of Forth
A simple tool allows us to achieve mastery with it, to fully understand its capabilities and its limitations. Fully understanding the limitations of a tool sparks creativity.
If you're curious what that could mean, consider guitarists. Six strings and a couple of frets is all their tool, the guitar, has. Yet there is a vast variety of guitar music in the world.
A digital example is old 8-bit computer graphics and how far Masters of the art pushed ith troughout the years.
My own CLI todo application falls well within what I consider a simple tool. It does what I need it to do, and no more. 50 lines of shell script is all that was required for it. With some calls to _man_ I will always be able to understand every aspect of it and change it if needed.
In the same vein, I can relate to the appeal of websites driven by Markdown. Where the content is stored in human readable text files rather than SQL databases, rendering into modern websites on the fly with the help of a tool chain. In fact, when I started to think of creating Laniakea, I did some research into static site generators, and eventually decided _fuck it_, I'll write everything by hand.
Why is that? I couldn't find a tool chain that was simple and that did Markdown to HTML conversion in a way that I liked. I'm sure there is something out there and I simply didn't look hard enough.
But what I found was a very different understanding of ‘simplicity’. Take Jekyll for example. It is the site generator used by Github Pages but you can use it yourself, there even is a docker image. I do like docker images. Unfortunatelly the default docker image is over 300 megabyte. Excuse me?! I'm sure Jekyll can do amazing things while converting Markdown to HTML, but 300 MB is… a lot. There is complexity under the hood that no average being will ever grasp.
On the other end of the spectrum we find a hand-crafted docker image of busybox httpd that is smaller than 100 _kilobyte_. Now, that is simple.
I don't mean to bash on Jekyll. It merely represents one end of a very broad spectrum. Other static site generators come in much slimer: Grav for example is below 50 MB and Jekyll's own 'minimal' docker image is around 70 MB. Still not exactly featherweights though.
If I were to replace a database-driven website such as Wordpress with one based on Markdown, then it isn't because I want to get rid of the database. I understand databases, I know how to handle them, how to do backups. If I were to do this, it would be to get rid of complexity. Exchanging one complex tool with another one isn't doing anything.
Of course, this is me. If you do not understand databases and instead are a master with Node.js, your perspective might well be a very different one.
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