> And now, having spoken of the men born of the pilot's craft, I shall say something about the tool with which they work - the airplane. Have you looked at a modern airplane? Have you followed from year to year the evolution of its lines? Have you ever thought, not only about the airplane but about whatever man builds, that all of man's industrial efforts, all his computations and calculations, all the nights spent over working draughts and blueprints, invariably culminate in the production of a thing whose sole and guiding principle is the ultimate principle of simplicity?
> It is as if there were a natural law which ordained that to achieve this end, to refine the curve of a piece of furniture, or a ship's keel, or the fuselage of an airplane, until gradually it partakes of the elementary purity of the curve of a human breast or shoulder, there must be the experimentation of several generations of craftsmen. In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness.
> It results from this that perfection of invention touches hands with absence of invention, as if that line which the human eye will follow with effortless delight were a line that had not been invented but simply discovered, had in the beginning been hidden by nature and in the end been found by the engineer. There is an ancient myth about the image asleep in the block of marble until it is carefully disengaged by the sculptor. The sculptor must himself feel that he is not so much inventing or shaping the curve of breast or shoulder as delivering the image from its prison.
> In this spirit do engineers, physicists concerned with thermodynamics, and the swarm of preoccupied draughtsmen tackle their work. In appearance, but only in appearance, they seem to be polishing surfaces and refining away angles, easing this joint or stabilizing that wing, rendering these parts invisible, so that in the end there is no longer a wing hooked to a framework but a form flawless in its perfection, completely disengaged from its matrix, a sort of spontaneous whole, its parts mysteriously fused together and resembling in their unity a poem.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, _Wind, Sand, and Stars_
Now things are holonomically controlled, every behavior is arbitrary and computer generated, nothing arises from necessity if we can avoid it.
With a spoon, anything you add will probably make it worse, you can sit and think and not find anything to change other than the material. If I give it adjustable length, the mechanism may be unsanitary.
There's no long list of features to pick from, once you've decided you're not making a spork, there's no real question of what to include, so the feature set(Be spoon) feels perfect, since I have no alternate design to compare it to.
Once you add a microcontroller you have so much possibility. Why can't my flashlight report battery level via Bluetooth and alert me when it's fully charged? A minor convenience, but it could be cheap enough I'd pay for it.
The tradeoff is a bit more code and a cheap chip. And I'm sure there's a dozen other features that I'd like to have if they were cheap.
Not only does the thought of a perfect harmony of only the necessary parts not always arise in a modern mindset.... but I wouldn't know how to recognize it if I saw it anyway. Is there a real engineering reason to leave out a feature? Did they not think of it? Or are they just appealing to love of simplicity for it's own sake? I don't know, I wasn't at the meeting, so I'll probably be annoyed and leave a comment saying they shouldn't have left this or that out.
Now, simplicity feels more like another feature to include or exclude, it doesn't just arise from the desire for low cost and reliability, since we sometimes but not always can make insane complexity cheaply that lasts decades.
The difference is that simplicity isn't compatible with a lot of other features, because it's almost like intentionally choosing to give up arbitrariness and holonomic control.
With a spoon, anything you add will probably make it worse, you can sit and think and not find anything to change other than the material. If I give it adjustable length, the mechanism may be unsanitary. There's no long list of features to pick from, once you've decided you're not making a spork, there's no real question of what to include, so the feature set(Be spoon) feels perfect, since I have no alternate design to compare it to.
Respectfully, this is completely untrue. If you really study spoons you will notice they exist in various scales, shapes, depths and materials for good reason. Furthermore, some are single use while others are optimized for longevity, various surface properties, weight, reduced physical envelope, ergonomics, aesthetics, strength, rigidity or flexibility, handling of liquids-vs-solids, pouring, surface piercing, tasting, use by machine, specific length, safety, environmental impact, regulatory requirements, measurement, cost of manufacture, logistic concerns or some other set of requirements.
Some clearer examples to consider are a wooden spoon used for mixing in a traditional kitchen baking context, a foldable single-use polymer spoon atop a yoghurt container, a traditional English teaspoon with decorative enamel, a ground coffee spoon, measurement spoons and the entire category of ladle-like instruments.
(Source: Stepped out of pure software 7 years ago to work in food robotics.)
That is a good point, many specialty spoons exist, but it's not quite the same as software.
I'm sure we all have utensils we like and dislike, but the feature set is pretty much the same on all of them, especially within a category of specialty type, the difference is mostly decorative and ergonomic.
Wheras with tech, we often add things that are only tangentially related to the original purpose, and we add layers of indirection between user and the actual purpose, with millions of ways that mapping can happen.
Two variants of nominally the same idea can have totally different possible applications, like a phone with and without a GPS. These days all smartphones have GPS, but what about UWB? What about a stylus? Or wireless charging?
They're all smartphones, sold for basically the same general market rather than some specific application, but everyone has a different set of features they want, because it's not a single-function device.
Some people might like more or less ornamentation, and some people might prefer silver over stainless steel, but even most of the specialized types don't have extra features, and nobody picks them up and wishes they did, and rarely do people prefer spoons to be multi-purpose.
> It is as if there were a natural law which ordained that to achieve this end, to refine the curve of a piece of furniture, or a ship's keel, or the fuselage of an airplane, until gradually it partakes of the elementary purity of the curve of a human breast or shoulder, there must be the experimentation of several generations of craftsmen. In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness.
> It results from this that perfection of invention touches hands with absence of invention, as if that line which the human eye will follow with effortless delight were a line that had not been invented but simply discovered, had in the beginning been hidden by nature and in the end been found by the engineer. There is an ancient myth about the image asleep in the block of marble until it is carefully disengaged by the sculptor. The sculptor must himself feel that he is not so much inventing or shaping the curve of breast or shoulder as delivering the image from its prison.
> In this spirit do engineers, physicists concerned with thermodynamics, and the swarm of preoccupied draughtsmen tackle their work. In appearance, but only in appearance, they seem to be polishing surfaces and refining away angles, easing this joint or stabilizing that wing, rendering these parts invisible, so that in the end there is no longer a wing hooked to a framework but a form flawless in its perfection, completely disengaged from its matrix, a sort of spontaneous whole, its parts mysteriously fused together and resembling in their unity a poem.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, _Wind, Sand, and Stars_