At Xerox PARC, a company, they had a slogan: “Point of view is worth 80 IQ points.”
It was based on a few things from the past, like how smart you had to be in Roman times to multiply two numbers together; Only geniuses did it. We haven’t gotten any smarter, we’ve just changed our representation system. We think better generally by inventing better representations; that’s something that we as computer scientists recognize as one of the main things that we try to do.
I’m not sure if I have 180+ IQ points, but some point of views do effect the way I look at things in my daily work. These 2 videos are quite thought provoking:
Simplicity Ain’t Easy by Stuart Halloway
Simple is not compound
Most of the solutions in software we create are compound solutions, they are not simple. By understanding what’s simple and what’s compound, you will have a higher chance of creating simpler designs and solutions.
Simple Made Easy by Rich Hickey
Simple vs. Easy
Simple is the opposite of complex. A thing is simple if it has no interweaving, if it has only one purpose, one concept, one dimension, one task. Being simple does not imply one instance or one operation: it’s about interweaving, not cardinality. Importantly, this means that simplicity is objective.
Easy is the opposite of hard, or difficult. A thing is easy if it’s near to hand, if it’s easy to get at (location), if it’s near to our understanding (familiarity) or skill set or if it’s within our capabilities. This means that ease is relative.
Focusing on ease and ignoring simplicity means that you’ll go really fast in the beginning, but will become slower and slower as the complexity builds.
Focusing on simplicity will mean that you’ll go slower in the beginning, because you’ll have to do some work to simplify the problem space, but making sure that you only have intrinsic complexity means that your rate of development will remain at a high constant.
