Keeping it Simple

I've always been one of those perhaps slightly annoying people who don't easily accept propositions that seem overly intricate. It's not that I'm a stroppy person - I'm pretty relaxed really - I just don't like wastefulness, and that can mean I'm unhappy when I see other people wasting their time doing things the hard way.

I suppose I was trained this way by the years I spent working with the Occam programming language, a language that espouses explicitly the avoidance of complexity by making behavioural semantics really clear to the developer. And Occam is named after William of Occam who, it's said, coined a law of succinctness called Occam's Razor - "entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem", or "entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity".

Is this relevant today? Well yes I think it is and not least in the sphere of Java Enterprise software. Things often are the way they are because they've grown up that way and it would be too expensive to put right the silly excesses. That may make good commercial sense, but when someone else comes along and says the Emperor is 'wearing no clothes', I say "Hear Hear!". Hence my enthusiasm for the Spring Framework and its first Spring Mission Statement bullet:

This is one of the key objectives of the Spring Framework.