Getting More Power by Limiting Your Options
There’s an interesting property of systems that rarely gets talked about:
Often, limiting your options actually increases your capability to do stuff (≙ your power)
Writing in here is haphazardous, disjointed and sketchy.
It's probably a good idea to come back later.
The whole history of programming languages is like that:
- C is just assembly with access to raw registers removed
- OO programming is just imperative programming
- functional programming is programming without mutation
Languages are like that:
Carving only a few out of all of the possible sound combinations enables us to speak a common tongue.
A lingua franca is like that: We humans limit us to only one language we use to do almost everything in a particular topics
A reserve currency is like that: By only limiting yourself to currency issued by a certain bank or country, everyone gets a medium of exchange to agree on, everyone benefits (and yes, the issuer of the reserve currency tends to benefit most)
Writing in here is haphazardous, disjointed and sketchy.
The underlying principle behind this is that all of these are instances of a thing from software engineering: Interfaces
There, you consciously limit yourself to only using a very limited subset of all the available options at the benefit of simplicity—and I think this is what underlies this here:
Simplicity is Power.