Why Easy Isn’t Always the Best?

Clojure is a functional programming language developed by Rich Hickey and introduced in 2007.

In 2011, Hickey gave a talk called “Simple Made Easy” at Strange Loop, significantly impacting the discussion around Clojure. During his talk, Hickey distinguished between “simple” and “easy.”

Simple is the opposite of complex, and it refers to how many things are entangled and how much is folded and twisted into one. On the other hand, easy is the opposite of complicated and relates to the effort required to perform a task.

What is perceived as easy is subjective and depends on how familiar we are with the task.

While ease is beneficial when writing code, there are other aspects to consider in the long run.

For example, when I compare other environments like Ruby and Ruby on Rails, why does the development speed slow down as projects age? Why does it become more complex to make changes? How can you build something non-trivial over time while still being confident in its quality and correctness?

Using a global mutable state in the form of ActiveRecord models and the database can make it challenging to keep track of everything. In object-oriented programming, objects also mix behavior and state, making things…