The fundamental mistake of Simple Made Easy was how many people interpreted them as orthogonal (or even opposing) qualities, when that's not inherently true.
This led to a lot of Clojure code being simple, but avoiding the hard additional work of also making it easy, and sometimes in even making it complete.
The prime example was tools.deps/deps.edn. It largely supplanted Leiningen for new code, but by being simple and minimal, it led to an explosion of ad hoc, custom tooling for 2-3 years afterwards, as everyone rewrote functionality that Lein already had, but tools.deps was missing. (And I say this as someone who once lost a whole week debugging a subtle maven/lein set ordering bug.)
Comments
The fundamental mistake of Simple Made Easy was how many people interpreted them as orthogonal (or even opposing) qualities, when that's not inherently true.
This led to a lot of Clojure code being simple, but avoiding the hard additional work of also making it easy, and sometimes in even making it complete.
The prime example was tools.deps/deps.edn. It largely supplanted Leiningen for new code, but by being simple and minimal, it led to an explosion of ad hoc, custom tooling for 2-3 years afterwards, as everyone rewrote functionality that Lein already had, but tools.deps was missing. (And I say this as someone who once lost a whole week debugging a subtle maven/lein set ordering bug.)