Before anything else, please check the reference to the title if you didn’t get it.
This week, Vaadin released its version 7.3 with the new easily configurable Valo theme. I just had to blog about this on my other blog, morevaadin.com, which uses Jekyll as static-site generation engine. The problem I had to tackle is that not only did I not use Jekyll since 5 months, my laptop had been remastered and I had to re-install the software.
Now, with the help of my friend Google, I managed to install homebrew, rbenv, ruby-build and jekyll (yes, Jekyll is a Ruby gem) in the course of an evening. The same evening, I wrote my blog post, fixed the configuration as well as bad link reference and generated the site. Easy as pie, even though I didn’t touch the thing is so much time!
Today, my thoughts hovered around that fact: it is easy! Just like some other tools - like Wordpress, are easy: easy to install, easy to configure and easy to use. In parallel, I thought about the original version of morevaadin.com I developed with Drupal. Let me tell you what: Drupal is extremely powerful but is a nightmare to configure. Making the switch from Drupal to Jekyll made my life easier a thousandfold.
The my mind wandered further and drew a parallel between simple programming languages and more powerful ones. This has been my experience when I tried to do some Scala workshop at the beginning of the year: after 6 months, I’ve been able to use only the simplest features, not the most powerful constructs. That had been sorely disappointing to me, as I realized I was worse in Scala than I thought.
I’m aware this parallel might be a little overstretched, however I cannot stop theorizing languages features power can be an asset but also a curse if one has to constantly keep using them to remember them. For example, I think that Java’s syntax is easy enough not only to use but also to remember, though I must conced I might be biased because I have more than 10 years experience developing in that language.
Whatever you design, tool, technique or language, it might be the best at what it does, but please consider that simplicity is a virtue.