Minimalism (computing)
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In
. Minimalism, in this sense, means designing systems that use the least hardware and software resources possible.History
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, programmers worked within the confines of relatively expensive and limited
Over time, personal-computer memory capacities expanded by orders of magnitude and mainstream programmers took advantage of the added storage to increase their software's capabilities and to make development easier by using
One example of a program whose system requirements once gave it a heavyweight reputation is the
As the capabilities and system requirements of common desktop software and operating systems grew throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and as software development became dominated by teams espousing conflicting, faddish
In the early 21st century, new developments in computing have brought minimalism to the forefront. In what has been termed the
Google's Chrome browser and ChromeOS are often cited as examples of minimalist design.[8][9]
Another example is Windows 8, where Microsoft implemented the "simple, squared-off" Metro appearance, which was less graphics-intensive than the previous Aero interface used in Windows 7 and Windows Vista. This change was made in part because of the rise of smaller, battery-powered devices and the need to conserve power.[10][11][12] Version 7 of Apple's iOS made similar changes for user experience reasons.[13]
Usage
Developers may create user interfaces to be as simple as possible by eliminating buttons and dialog boxes that may potentially confuse the user. Minimalism is sometimes used in its visual arts meaning, particularly in the industrial design of the hardware device or software theme.
Some developers have attempted to create programs to perform a particular function in the fewest lines of code, or smallest compiled executable size possible on a given platform.
The programming hobby of code golf results in minimalist software,[26] but these are typically exercises or code poetry, not usable applications software.
See also
- Code bloat
- Code refactoring
- Concision: Brief, succinct.
- Don't repeat yourself
- Feature creep
- KISS principle
- Light-weight Linux distribution
- Muntzing
- Pareto principle 80:20 rule
- Rule of least power
- Software bloat
- Unix philosophy
- Wirth's law
- Worse is better
- Zawinski's law of software envelopment
- GreenBrowser
References
- ISBN 9780470881804.
- ^ "Five reasons why Emacs will always be better".
- ^ "My Lisp Experiences and the Development of GNU Emacs".
...I aimed to make the absolute minimal possible Lisp implementation. The size of the programs was a tremendous concern. There were people in those days, in 1985, who had one-megabyte machines without virtual memory. They wanted to be able to use GNU Emacs. This meant I had to keep the program as small as possible. For instance, at the time the only looping construct was while, which was extremely simple. There was no way to break out of the 'while' statement, you just had to do a catch and a throw, or test a variable that ran the loop. That shows how far I was pushing to keep things small. We didn't have 'caar' and 'cadr' and so on; "squeeze out everything possible" was the spirit of GNU Emacs, the spirit of Emacs Lisp, from the beginning.
- ^ "dwm - dynamic window manager".
- ^ ne has been written with sparing resource use as a basic goal. Every possible effort has been made to reduce the use of CPU time and memory, the number of system calls, and the number of characters output to the terminal. -- ne info page
- ^ Strickland, Jonathan (12 February 2009). "HowStuffWorks "What's the difference between notebooks, netbooks and ultra-mobi"". Computer.howstuffworks.com. Retrieved 8 July 2013.
- ^ "5 ways to improve battery life in your app".
- ^ "Google Chrome Cr-48, Paragon of Minimalist Design". PC Magazine. 13 December 2010.
- ^ Pilcher, Pat (13 July 2009). "Battle of the browsers - which is master of the web?". The Independent. London. Archived from the original on 15 May 2022.
- ^ Chang, Alexandra (21 May 2012). "Microsoft Drops 'Aero Glass' User Interface in Windows 8 | Gadget Lab". Wired. Wired.com. Retrieved 8 July 2013.
- ^ McCracken, Harry (22 May 2012). "Windows Aero: Why I'm Glad It's Dead | TIME.com". Time. Techland.time.com. Retrieved 8 July 2013.
- ^ In 2009, desktops were 44% of the worldwide market and laptops were 56%. Just 3 years later, over 61% of the PCs sold are laptops and the trend is accelerating—this is globally, measuring all Windows PCs sold. Among consumers in the United States buying a PC this year, more than 76% will purchase laptops—the absolute number of all US desktops sold will be fewer than the number of tablets in 2012!
- ^ "Why Jony Ive Is Killing Skeuomorphism In iOS 7". 10 June 2013.
- ^ "Crafting a Tiny Mach-O Executable".
- ^ "Minimalist Cocoa programming".
- ^ "Friendly to the environment". Archived from the original on 2 February 2014. Retrieved 31 January 2014.
This operating system is designed to run on Pentium2 processors with 256MB RAM, not even an harddisk is needed. Unleash the full potential of computers even with a second hand PC.
- ^ "The Art of Unix Programming".
A 1974 paper in Communications of the ACM gave Unix its first public exposure. In that paper, its authors described the unprecedentedly simple design of Unix, reported over 600 Unix installations. All were on machines underpowered even by the standards of that day, but (as Ritchie and Thompson wrote) "constraint has encouraged not only economy, but also a certain elegance of design."
- ^ "Build Your Own Lisp".
- ISBN 9781449330118.
- ^ "7 lines of code, 3 minutes: Implement a programming language from scratch".
- ^ "The Evolution of Lisp" (PDF).
The initial report on Scheme [Sussman, 1975b] describes a very spare language, with a minimum of primitive constructs, one per concept. (Why take two when one will do?)
- ^ "Scheme-faq-general".
Scheme is a dialect of Lisp that stresses conceptual elegance and simplicity.
- ISBN 9780596555504.
Forth is a computer language with minimal syntax
- ^ "Go".
Go is an open source programming language that makes it easy to build simple, reliable, and efficient software.
- ^ "Interview with Ken Thompson".
...we started off with the idea that all three of us had to be talked into every feature in the language, so there was no extraneous garbage put into the language for any reason.
- ^ "Wik Wiki A Wiki in 1287 characters of PHP".
- ISBN 0-262-03249-X. Retrieved 21 November 2007.
- S2CID 14851897. Retrieved 29 July 2008.
- ^ "Uzbl - web interface tools which adhere to the unix philosophy".
The general idea is that Uzbl by default is very bare bones.