in some sense, the Brainfuck programming language is extremely simple. it only has eight instructions! an intermediate programmer could write an interpreter in an afternoon! that's so simple it borders on trivial! specifically, Brainfuck is simple to implement.
using Brainfuck, on the other hand, is so self-evidently a bad idea that it's the entire point. even the Wikipedia “hello world” snippet would be no small task to independently discover (and even more direct ways to print “hello world” are a bit of a mess). there is still a lot of complexity, it’s just been moved downstream, out of the implementer's hands and into the user's.
it'd be absurd to claim that Brainfuck is simple, because the only real way to get any nontrivial work done in Brainfuck would be to find or create a programming language that compiles into Brainfuck, at which point Brainfuck adds nothing. there are things we reasonably expect programming languages to do, and a simple language might do them simply but Brainfuck simply doesn’t do them. i think it'd be unhelpful and misleading to call that “simplicity” when it's just not fulfilling the responsibilities that we generally expect programming languages to fulfill.
fortunately, nobody actually says Brainfuck is simple. unfortunately, however, the idea that “simple” means “simple to implement, regardless of how complicated it is to use” is a long-lived meme among certain kinds of programmers. one cluster of such programmers is called suckless, and their backwards understanding of simplicity leads to fascinating decisions like “the way you change the settings in this software is by editing config.h and recompiling it”. it's software that gatekeeps itself:
Because dwm is customized through editing its source code, it's pointless to make binary packages of it. This keeps its userbase small and elitist. No novices asking stupid questions. There are some distributions that provide binary packages though.
this sucks more than systemd or cmake or any of the software they’re butthurt about ever could.
there's a semi-overlapping cluster of annoying fossbro nonsense over on cat-v.org. some of it is the same boomer nonsense about old software good new software bad, and some of it is more directly venerating Rob Pike and The UNIX Philosophy™. the website is named after a talk Rob Pike gave in 1983, “UNIX Style, or cat -v Considered Harmful”. that page also links to a paper by Rob Pike and Brian Kernighan, which is a really interesting case study in The UNIX Philosophy™.
what is cat? if you ask someone who knows a bit about the command line on macOS or Linux, they’ll tell you it displays the contents of a file, but if you ask a proper UNIX dweeb they’ll tell you it concatenates files (hence the name) and it’s a happy accident that it’ll display the contents of a single file. as Pike and Kernighan put it,
The fact that cat will also print on the terminal is a special case. Perhaps surprisingly, in practice it turns out that the special case is the main use of the program.
and right away we have encountered a flaw in the UNIX Philosophy™ tenet that a program should do one thing well. cat does two things well: concatenating files and displaying them. a program that displays files well would very reasonably benefit from options to add line numbers or display non-printing characters (in BSD, cat -s and the titular cat -v), but Pike and Kernighan are right that a program that concatenates files well would need no such options.
but if displaying a file is the main use of cat, then it is absurd to argue that displaying a file is not the one thing it should do well. Pike and Kernighan suggest adding line numbers with awk and displaying non-printing characters with a new program vis, to maintain the purity of cat for concatenating files, but that sucks. cat is responsible for displaying files, and as such if it can’t meet reasonable requests about displaying files, that’s not simplicity, that’s an abdication of that responsibility. cat -v is good, and 1983 Rob Pike was wrong, and The UNIX Philosophy™ is bogus.
okay so; i have takes on this topic, which both the suckless crowd and the opposite may find to veer into the territory of "hot takes" (albeit maybe of the microwaved variety)
at its core; the UNIX philosophy is about programs doing one thing well. and, well, i agree; programs should do one thing well and focus on that one thing; and i heavily dislike the modern trend of integrating everything into one gigantic blob (which is also why i still use X11 rather than Wayland but that's besides the point)
where i diverge heavily from the boomers shouting about the UNIX philosophy is in what i consider doing one thing well
because if a program is so minimalist that it requires external tools to practically apply for its main purpose, it's not doing the one thing well
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for example; suckless touts that DWM has no shell config, no remote control, no layers, etc.
that doesn't mean it focuses on doing one thing well, it just means you made a window manager that sucks ass (hehe, suckless, more like suckass) because you thought simplicity means good, when in reality it lacks the features needed to do its job as a window manager well
take my preferred WM, i3 (for now anyways, looking at awesomewm maybe), for example; it has remote control and extensive runtime configuration, those are among the things that make it such a good window manager; it does its primary singular purpose well not in spite of all those features, but because of them
basically they confused one purpose with one function; when in reality the thing in doing one thing well is more purpose than function imo anyways
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and well, i'm in large part of the opinion that the purpose of a tool is what it does (without blatant misuse or fuckery, looking at you, my script that uses GCC for HTML templating); and cat spits files out into a terminal, therefore its purpose is to spit files out to a terminal, and accommodations for that are useful
not to mention that stdout is pretty much a file; you are concatenating to a file, and in that very common concatenation -s and -v are useful anyways
