Dear Mimi:

Although I wanted, I did not have the time to read thoroughly the paper.
I just have done so.

What can I say, I wholeheartedly agree with the paper, every single bit and piece of it.
I disagree (but semantically) that for Chandler that "Complexity was the best route to Simple".
I think it is Complex to explain, even more complex to code, complex to understand from the reading (it requires a mental effort), but I believe from the use for the layman, it will be deceptively simple and end up thinking, why wasn´t this in the first place, not knowing what it takes to be that simple and have that layer of abstraction.

I would like to express how much I agree as a wrong path to take the way Outlook and Entourage have implemented necessities through a hard "concrete" approach.
I do believe as you say that this is the wrongful way. People should not adapt to software, software should adapt to people (sounds familiar ? 1984?)

I believe also that the evolution of a task into a project and so forth IS the right path.
Also that things are not either immutable nor concrete, and that a lot of elements are in constant evolution throughout their life cycle.

Therefore I completely adhere to the idea of morphing versus staticity.
I especially like the comparison to Mozart.
Do you remember the film Amadeus when Mozart is depicted as childish and with an ease that Salieri didn´t had and that he envied, and how he produced music through the rolling of dice as if he was playing with an eternal ease.
Reminds me also how Woz could simplify the controller of a Diskette drive mechanism from 20 or more IC to 5 I believe.
Wouldn´t it be nice to make beauty out of such simplicities?

Yours,

Daniel Vareika




Mimi Yin wrote:
Daniel, first of all I want to thank you for reading over the material so carefully. I absolutely agree that there are many ways to solve a problem and the wiki pages I posted last time were simply some ideas to help illustrate the data modeling issues we were discussing. 

Your design ideas provide rich fodder for more discussion but first, I want  to address this issue of complexity or it's converse: simplicity in design and my personal take on how to evaluate the complexity of Chandler's design.


I am putting together some thoughts on your sketches in a separate mail.

On Sep 30, 2005, at 5:59 AM, Daniel Vareika wrote:

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