Simplicity is a Feature

Cory Benfield @Lukasaoz https://speakerdeck.com/lukasa/simplicity-is-a-feature

The big take away:

Simplicity is about defaults

Build your software in library

Example: multipart http upload

3 levels

• low level
• features
• simplicity

low level - eg httplib

• don’t try to “help” - give user complete control
• to the point of letting people do “invalid” stuff

feature level - eg urllib3

• users no semantics of the problem, but don’t need to understand every detail
• still have quite a bit of control
• only support valid cases

simplicity level - eg requests

• this should be the default if someone searches how to do something
• does not have to support all valid use cases - 80% is fine, to keep it simple
• lots of defaults, to make it easy for users
• “do the right thing”
• allow user to drop to level 2 - requests has an object giving access to urllib3
• can do multipart file load in one logical line!

80%

• understand the domain
• see what most users are doing
• solve the problems for most people
• you can’t make everyone happy all of the time, but you can make some people ecstatic!

requests like libraries

• flask is the requests of web serving