Machine Beauty
When something works well, you can feel it; there is a sense of rightness to it. We call that rightness beauty, and it ought to be the single most important component of design. This recognition is at the heart of David Gelernter's wittily argued essay, Machine Beauty, which defines beauty as an inspired mating of simplicity and power. You can see it in a Bauhaus chair, the Hoover Dam, or an Emerson radio circa 1930. In contrast, too many contemporary technologists run out of ideas and resort to gimmicks and features; they are rarely capable of real, structural ingenuity. Nowhere is this more evident than in the world of computers. You don't have to look far to see how oblivious most computer technologists are to the idea of beauty. Just look at how ugly your computer cabinet is, how unwieldy and out of sync if feels with the manner and speed with which you process thought. The best designers, however, are obsessed with beauty. Both hardware and software should afford us the greatest opportunity to achieve deep beauty, the kind of beauty that happens when many types of loveliness reinforce one another, when design expresses an underlying technology, a machine logic. Program software ought to be transparent: it should engage what Gelernter calls "a thought-amplifying feedback loop," a creative symbiosis with its user.
Stats for nerds
1recommend
4mentions
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2010–2025years
25% recommend75% neutral
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What Hacker News says
- Mirror Worlds (the book) is a great read. I have it on my shelf next to his other book, Machine Beauty. I didn't know he was a victim of the Unabomber, that's unfortunate.
- This is amazing. I was literally reading the 3rd chapter of the book "Machine Beauty" in bed, saw the baby Clifford Stoll mentioned and looked it up because it sounded familiar. Of course I've seen the beautiful glass bottles here on HN before, so I went back to my book. After putting it down and hopping on HN, of course I see an article referencing this exact topic! Such a small world.
- You're correct (upvoted for that), it's my right and I decided long ago. I'm ok paying the price, also reaping the rewards of very fast page loading, zero tracking, and shutting off a huge vector for malware.
But others with less tech knowledge (which is 97% of the population I guess) are not in a position to make the choice and have to trust. Some people abuse that trust for profit. Other web devs are well-intentioned but clueless about the risks they put on the users.
Also I disable JS long ago because I knew that there would be unknown unknows, and bingo: (https://react-etc.net/entry/exploiting-speculative-execution...) "Exploiting Speculative Execution (Meltdown/Spectre) via JavaScript"
It's a matter of trust; trust is earned; the industry as a whole hasn't earned it.
Further reading:
Remember that there is no code faster than no code. -- Taligent's Guide to Designing Programs
Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible. -- Alan Kay
Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away. -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
[...]But there is one quality that cannot be purchased in this way---and that is reliability. The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay. -- C.A.R. Hoare, "The Emperor's Old Clothes", Turing Award Lecture (1980)
Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling --- the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration. Possibly this trend results from a mistaken belief that using a somewhat mysterious device confers an aura of power on the user. -- Niklaus Wirth
The difference between a good and a poor architect is that the poor architect succumbs to every temptation and the good one resists it. -- Ludwig Wittgenstein
Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity. -- David Gelernter, "Machine Beauty", Basic Books (1998)
Fools ignore complexity; pragmatists suffer it; experts avoid it; geniuses remove it. -- Alan Perlis
The cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components of a computer system are those that aren't there. -- Graham Bell
[...]Simplicity and elegance are unpopular because they require hard work and discipline to achieve and education to be appreciated. -- Edsger W. Dijkstra
Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming. -- Brian Kernighan
Complexity is a sign of technical immaturity. Simplicity of use is the real sign of a well design product whether it is an ATM or a Patriot missile. -- Daniel T. Ling
There's an old story about the person who wished his computer were as easy to use as his telephone. That wish has come true, since I no longer know how to use my telephone. -- Bjarne Stroustrup
The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents. -- Nathaniel S. Borenstein
- "Steven Jobs may be no inventor, but to his credit he recognized elegance when he saw it and understood its significance." -- David Gelernter, in his 1998 book Machine Beauty.
About ten pages after the above quote, Gelernter describes pretty much everything this suit was about in some detail, e.g. a use of the "time travel" metaphor very much like Time Machine's Finder interface, wherein the whole interface reverts to a previous state. Even if you don't agree with the verdict (or the damages, yikes) it's unthinkable after reexamining this book that folks at Apple didn't get some ideas from Gelernter's work, perhaps without even realizing it.
Incidentally, it is a great book that I highly recommend.
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