Dan Luu

When I complained about how ill-defined "simple" was, a lot of people pointed me to Hickey's "simple made easy". Here's a challenge about that: Provide code that is simple but not easy. Then provide code in the same language, doing the same thing, that is easy but not simple.

Took me a while to get to it, but I re-watched this talk as a result of your tweet and the most striking thing to me is how it's a series of reasonable sounding but totally unsupported and often ill-defined and/or unfalsifiable claims.

When I worked on flash mem (2001), I read the literature on how it worked. At the time, the exact physical mechanism by which some things happened wasn't understood. There were theories, but multiple theories were consistent with what was observed. But we can make flash reliable!

And to the extent that it's not reliable, we can describe when we expect it to be unreliable and what the odds are. Someone might argue that this is equivalent to "understanding", but that's your point, I think -- the talk is so vague it can mean whatever you want.