simple is not small

@notjack.space: UIs with too many buttons confuse and alarm me @sixfold-origami.com: ah, this is the unix thing! @notjack.space: no, because I want cross device sync to actually work Do we need simplicity? Recently, I gave a talk titled "Precise, consistent, and reliable code coverage". It's about a truly gnarly bug that took my company 9 months to debug. At the end, my friend Predrag asks: How would you recommend that we think about building tools such that these epic debugging stories aren't as necessary? and I answer him: We need to prioritize simplicity. If you go back to my coverage pipeline, there are a lot of nodes in this diagram. [...] The tooling's complicated. We need to rethink how our computing works. I'm not satisfied with that answer. Unix pipelines are not simple Consider two programs to calculate the frequency of words of a file. First, a small unix pipeline: cat README.md \ | tr --complement --squeeze-repeats '[:alpha:]' '\n' \ | tr A-Z a-z \ | sort \ | uniq --count…