Easy will always trump simple

Rich Hickey’s classic “Simple Made Easy” talk is making the rounds again—as a mirror held up to dev culture under pressure. The punchline: we keep picking solutions that are easy but tangled, instead of simple and sane.

The essay draws a sharp line between that habit and a concept from biology: exaptation. In short, systems evolve by bending what’s nearby into something new. That’s Postgres MVCC. That’s SQLite. Not designed for it, but it works.