The community driven foss.in/2006 kicked off this morning. The J N Tata Auditorium is now packed with delegates, speakers and volunteers. Suparna Bhattacharya is talking about simple and minimalistic approach – especially deriving from her experience in working with the Linux Kernel.
Ok, so this is about the Linux Kernel, which I do not understand. The closes I got to operating system development was when we did NachOS implementation during the NCST course.
But, I am enjoying her talk. She spoke about crash dump, async IO etc. The initially complicated solutions – 5 to 6K LOC, and then much simpler approaches of 500 or so lines of code. Simplicity is good, and it takes a refined thought process to do it. The typical developer mentality is to add features, but how about keeping only what’s required. Awareness is growing about simplicity.
She says: “The art of simplification is an essential aspect of keeping the kernel useful and fun to work on”.
Another thing: “We generally think what will be required in the future, but the truth is, we don’t”!
That says a lot!