# The Appeal of Small, Simple Programs

DevFeed: [The Appeal of Small, Simple Programs](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/fascinating-little-programs-20665.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<http://antirez.com/news/74>)

Published: 2014-03-13T22:32:59Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [Antirez](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/antirez.md>)

Topics: [Code](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/code.md>), [Programming](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/programming.md>), [Refactoring](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/refactoring.md>), [Assembly](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/assembly.md>), [C](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/c.md>), [JavaScript](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/javascript.md>)

Tags: [code](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/code.md>), [creativity](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/creativity.md>), [minimalism](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/minimalism.md>), [programming](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/programming.md>), [pull-requests](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/pull-requests.md>), [refactoring](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/refactoring.md>)

## AI overview

The author reflects on working with linenoise, a small line-editing library, and argues that small programs can offer control, understandability, elegance, and opportunities for creative solutions. The article contrasts focused small code with the complexity of large projects.

## Source excerpt

Yesterday and today I managed to spend some time with linenoise (http://github.com/antirez/linenoise), a minimal line-editing library designed to be a simple and small replacement for readline. I was trying to merge a few pull requests, to fix issues, and doing some refactoring at the same time. It was some kind of nirvana I was feeling: a complete control of small, self-contained, and useful code. There is something special in simple code. Here I'm not referring to simplicity to fight complexity or over engineering, but to simplicity per se, auto referential, without goals if not beauty, understandability and elegance. After all the programming world has always been fascinated with small programs. For decades programmers challenged in 1k or 4k contexts, from the 6502 assembler to today's javascript contests. Even the obfuscated C contest, after all, has a big component in the minimalism. Why is it so great to hack a small piece of code? Yes is small and simple, those are two good points. It can be totally understood, dominated. You can use smartness since little code is the only place of the world where coding smartness will pay off, since in large projects obviousness is far better in the long run. However I believe there is more than that, and is that small programs can be perfect. As perfect as a sonnet composed of a few words. The limits in size and in scope, constitute an intellectual stratagem to avoid the "it may be better" trap, when this better is not actually measurable and evident. Under these strict limits, what the program does is far more interesting than what it does not. Actually the constraints are the more fertile ground for creativity of the solutions, otherwise likely useless: at scale there is always a more correct, understood, canonical way to do everything. There is an interview of Bill Gates in the first years of the Microsoft experience where he describes this feeling when writing the famous Microsoft BASIC interpreter. The limits were the