design-philosophy

Design is simplifying, not complicating.

(I forget who said it but it would fit with Rich Hickey).

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

Leanordo Da Vinci

The property of good design.

Elegance?

Pardon me, Your Honor, the concept is not easy to explain – there is an ineffable quality to some technology, described by its creators as a concinnitous, or technically sweet, or a nice hack – signs that it was made with great care by one who was not merely motivated but inspired. It is the difference between an engineer and a hacker.

Judge Fang and Miss Pao in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

• Isn't good design not only simply, but also sort of rich in it's simplicity?
• Lego has like 12 or 20 important stones, not 2.
• If I understand correctly, particle physics is elegant. And in particle physics there are not 2 kinds of things but like 10.
• I don't buy the idea that elegance is mere compression. More is happening - expressivity.

• paraphrasing:
• Leibniz: The world is intelligible because nature ('God') made the world from maximally simple rules, creating maximal content-level richness.
• Rule level / Algorithms: Example natural selection.
• Content level / dynamic layer: Example concrete tree of life / genetics.
• Von Neuman architecture; Rule level: The hardware, Content level: The software.
• Lisp: Rule level: The interpreter, the REPL. Dynamic level: The program.
• Leibniz: Vernunftgruende - simple reasons that cannot be otherwise (rule level).
• Tatsachengruende - complicated reasons (historical, contingend) that could have been otherwise. (like the specifics of organims, why elephant trunks? because history).
• We resemble fish during embryology, not because of a law of nature, but a factual reason / historical continency. Tatsachengrund. Alternatives of this could be true, we could not resemble fish during embryology.
• In fact, it is a law of nature (epistemology, evolution by natural selection) that the alternatives are possible.
• The reasons for why a nand abstract circuit is performing a nand and why it can be build into a universal computer, are of a different kind. They don't depend on actual contingent facts. A rational reason, Vernunftgrund. The negation of this is perhaps non-sensical - A nand circuit not performing the logical operation nand - if this would be up for grabs, then anything would.

• Leibniz: The world is the best possible world in the sense that from the smallest set of rules, the largest set of beauty was created.
• The world grows from a set of simple rules - sometimes called koleidoscope hypothesis [who? F. Cholet in cognitive science context].
• Leibniz: Why does science work in the first place? Despite it's complexity, the world can be described by simpler rules (algorithms).
• Leibniz also already understood that any sequence of data (content level) can be described by a function.
• For a computer programmer, there exists always a program that will output a string of N bit length: Example in Clojure

"001010110011"

• There is always a program that uses the same amount of memory as the string itself. Saying that the program (nature) is taking on the shape of the data. It is like the maximally useless scientific theory to say that the data exists.
• Hermann Weyl (paraphrazed): If you would allow any function to count as 'law of nature', the notion of law of nature would be vacuous.
• In other words, science can find rules that compress the description of the world and make it predictable.
• This interplay of simplicity and comlexity comes out everywhere (in science and explanation making) once you look.
• We can describe the software of a program with a few simple statements, yet an epic story of bits, electricity in circuits, memory lookups - themselves on a considerable level of abstraction on top of the circuits etc. happen.
• You cannot look at the bits to say what the software is doing, it is a level violation. This is a real affliction we have in computational neuroscience.
• In complexity science, the term 'emergence' means that there is a higher level of description possible, that is there is a way to talk in simple terms about a thing - even though in reality it is made from many different interwoven parts.
• Software is the quintessential example.
• Physiology was one of my favorite subjects of biology. It's a language of design and function:
• We talk of the heart as a blood pump. Using this abstraction gives leverage over describing what the heart does.
• You can make predictions: For example when it goes too slow the blood will not be pumped as well, ergo whatever the point of blood flow is will be a problem - causal reasoning.
• It might seem obvious, but this is because biology is an awesome science.
• consider how clueless we are when we look at the neuronal activity of the brain.
• How clueless we would be when looking at the electricity of a computer without knowing the concept of an operating system.

The best design is not merely simple, it is even "self evident" (Stuart Halloway 2012).

• Elegance is the property of good design (in Software design).
• The Vitruvian Triad is "durability, convenience, and beauty".
• Elegance is pragmatic, useful and delightful.
• Elegance is mysterious, hangs together with truth, scientific discovery and art.
• In pure math, an 'elegant' program is sometimes the shortest computer program with a certain input-output, given an axiomatic system A.

• Vitruv
• David Deutsch
• Why Are Flowers Beautiful?
• Ranulph Glanville