rdmiller3's Journal: Why's it always gotta be so complicated?

I came up with a new "complexity theorem" the other day, so I'm putting it in my Slashdot journal where pretty much nobody will likely ever read it.

Everything will be complex in proportion to its perceived importance. Real complexity which is deemed unimportant will be perceived through simplifications (if at all) and things which are considered important will be burdened with minutiae and arbitrary garbage.

Why? Two reasons. First, simply because they will tolerate difficulties in whatever is important to them. Second, because the tolerance for complexity in general is a handy way for people to measure each other's brains. Thus, it has an out-of-band use.

Having recently acquired some basic proficiency in Esperanto, I can see this arbitrary complexity in languages very plainly. There's no need for verbs to conjugate differently, nor for irregular forms. One can't blame it all on the mixing and development of language because some complex archaic forms have been dropped for simpler modern forms. Take for example how the word "you" has usurped the second person singular in both nominative and accusative cases which used to be "thou" and "thee". In some locales, it has made a complete migration into the singular, being replaced by the incorrect "yous" for the plural. But that makes sense in a way, so it has been officially rejected. Even in Esperanto one sees the influence of this effect as the number of de-facto exceptions increases in a language which some claim (falsely) has no exceptions to its sixteen basic rules.

One ever-apparent example of the constant push toward lingual complexity is generation-specific slang. Just think, for example, how many different words you can remember having been used to indicate the simple concepts of the adjective "good" and the noun "excrement", and how they've kept coming and going (puns not originally intended) over time.

And how with graphical user interface (GUI) design? Same thing. The programmer thinks that their software is the most important thing, so it ends up complex. The user doesn't care about the programmer though, and ends up resenting the tedium of searching through arbitrary lists, menus and screens just to find where to "click" to accomplish a task which they already understand in concept.

What I get out of this is an understanding that I should strive to reduce the complexity of the user interfaces which I create. I need to be humble about my role, and the role of my work, and allow the user to perceive complexity through the interface rather than in it.