The K.I.S.S. principle??

[The Heretic]

I am sure you all know what K.I.S.S. means (Keep It Simple Stupid), but of late I have been thinking that the K.I.S.S. principle has had some interesting examples of validation in the Computer Sci world. One example I have been exploring of late is XML.

When the Internet and connectivity of geographically and architecturally disparate computers became possible, people in the software world looked at various ways to share data and "objects" (from object oriented languages) between all these computers. For years there were struggles with implementing these schemes - mostly because they were very complex, but also because MS didn't like CORBA (i.e., a severe case of not invented here syndrome - which MS will die from eventually), and so they proposed their own standard, DCOM. I won't even try to explain what these schemes are in detail - just take my word for it that they are complex.

So not only did us poor software engineers have to get our heads around these complex schemes, we had to choose one or the other. Along comes XML. What is XML? It is an example of the K.I.S.S. principle; XML files are simple text files that look somewhat like HTML (they are both markup languages):

<Address>
<AddressLine>34567 Mullberry Lane</AddressLine>
<AddressLine>Suite 200</AddressLine>
<City>Lumberton</City>
<State>TX</State>
<PostalCode>75070</PostalCode>
</Address>

XML (Extensible Markup Language) is essentially a markup language for data - more importantly, it makes data portable between different computers running different operating systems, different applications written in different languages. As you can see, it is fairly simple - even non-computer people can understand its basic structure as at its core it is extremely simple.

Yet XML is probably the predominant buzzword to have on your resume if you are a software engineer - all else is pretty much secondary. There is a lot more to XML, but all of it is built on the elegant and simple principle of just plain text markup for data.

How does this affect you?

An example: in the future XML and all of it derivative extensions will have quite an effect on you as a web surfer. Rather than doing a Google search on "dodge + viper + price" and getting ten million hits, 99.999% of them unrelated (including hits on some guy's website where he keeps snakes [some of them vipers] as pets), you will get many fewer hits (maybe a thousand or so) with a 50% or higher relevance to what you are actually looking for (the price for a dodge viper).

Why? Because where HTML (the markup language used for most websites) is a presentation language, XML will actually describe what the content is, rather than how to display it.

The adoption of XML by almost everybody everywhere (even Microsoft is using it) will provide the kind of interconnectivity and productivity the early internet pioneers dreamed of. If you think the internet is a good thing now, it is going to be a hundred times better with XML.

So, what examples can you think of where K.I.S.S. has or will have such an effect on our lives? I am especially interested in examples where K.I.S.S. has won out over something orders of magnitude more complex like XML has over CORBA/DCOM.

 

[CoolidgEffect]

I thought it was Knight's In Satan's Service.

 

[The Heretic]

What? Am I too boring? Or can people just not think of anything along these lines?

I can think of one; the transistor. The basic transistor is a very simple solid state version of a vacuum tube and its evolution eventually made practical and inexpensive digital computers possible. If we had stuck with the more complex vacuum tubes we would not be anywhere near where we are now with regards to technology.

 

[Don K Dyck]

A Few Aussie Innovations

Hi Heretic . . . thanks for the informative post . . . one of the few puta posts that I have read that actually make sense to the non-nerd . . . would Linux be a candidate? Microosoft Works is one of the great oxymorons . . .

Then in agriculture, there are many Oz inventions that revolutionised farming . . .

1. the stump-jump plough . . . when caught, the ploughshare point rotated back and up, freeing itself from the obstructing root;

2. the Mackay Combine Harvester, stripped grain off the stalk and collected it in a bin, rather than the previous hand reaping, stooking, threshing and bagging - the machine design was "stolen" and copied by IH who finally bought Mackay, the biggest manufacturer in the southern hemisphere, to cover their perfidy;

3. the Howard Rotovator which created a seedbed in a single pass, thus removing multiple passes to rip and harrow the ground down to the required particle fineness before sowing;

4. no-till farming, where seedbed ploughing is replaced with chemical weed spraying and direct seed drilling into the soil among the standing dead stalks of the previous crop, minimising the number of machine passes over the crop ground so reducing soil compaction by machine weight;

5. the American Whitney Spinning Jenny which "liberated" huge numbers of slaves from the arduous task of hand separating cotton lint from the cotton seed - this machine was not patented;

6. the Wollesley overhead shearing machine which replaced hand-held blade shears (like big scissors) and was later combined with the Tally-Hi shearing method to alllow shearers to shear over 200 sheep per man per day; even so, the record for most sheep shorn in a day was held for almost a century until the 1990s by Jackie Howe from Queensland who used hand shears; Wollesley later went back to England in the early twentieth century and built the car marque finally purchased by BMC.

Just a few of the literally thousands of aussie innovations that have made the world a better place.

 

[fingers_larue]

This thread is a good example of how important the idea of K.I.S.S. is.

 

[teddybear4play]

I think in so many things, simplification is the goal.

VHS won out over BETA because VHS was seen as simpler and cheaper. DVD's will soon kill videotapes, just as CD's have strangled audiotapes, because they're simpler, smaller, and faster.

TB4p

 

[The Heretic]

I think in so many things, simplification is the goal.

VHS won out over BETA because VHS was seen as simpler and cheaper. DVD's will soon kill videotapes, just as CD's have strangled audiotapes, because they're simpler, smaller, and faster.

TB4p

At its core, binary digital has won out over analog due to core simplicity; it is either a one or a zero - on or off.

I don't know that VHS won over BETA due to simplicity as much as poor marketing and other factors (JVC actually derived VHS from the BETA specs that Sony had shared with it) - in many ways BETA was actually superior to VHS, but I don't think one was actually simpler than the other - although, as you suggested, VHS may have been percieved as being simpler.