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From: bzs@BU-CS.BU.EDU (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: Where are the small thinkers?
Message-ID: <8710290600.AA05997@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Date: Thu, 29-Oct-87 01:00:42 EST
Article-I.D.: bu-cs.8710290600.AA05997
Posted: Thu Oct 29 01:00:42 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 3-Nov-87 05:51:59 EST
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There is another version of "small" that is more tied to a software's
design than its mere size. It has to do with fighting the permutations.

I have a friend who says that anything with more than 4 simultaneous
options is doomed. He reasons that that's probably a dozen or more
viable combinations and the human mind can usually only juggle several
on a good day.

Thus we see the negativity towards a Unix command like 'ls' where I
can type 'ls -lutc' and lord knows what will come out. At another
extreme is an editor like emacs which has thousands of options and
commands but seems to work well enough because I rarely have to
consider their interaction unless I'm hacking it. The major command
interaction is pre-fixing a command with a count. Some may disagree
with my examples but I'm sure you can find your own.

I think to some extent this dimension is as important as any measure
of "small". Perhaps "simple" is beautiful. I believe Dennis Ritchie
remarked in his BSTJ article (my memory might fail me here, it's not
handy) that the smallness of the PDP-11 systems they had to work on
forced smallness and this smallness in turn forced simplicity and
a need for an elegant power in their design.

I don't think smallness for smallness' sake is the point, it's clarity
of design (which sometimes is borne of constraints, but not limited to
it nor even ensured by it, RT-11's syscall interface was surely small
and constrained but it was still complex, like I said, it only takes
about four interacting things to cause problems.)

	-Barry Shein, Boston University