What if dumb meant smart?

This is not a hypothetical in my particular case, I've been mis-using the word "dumb" and "stupid" as slang for the last 20+ years.

I was building the Sesler house under Gary Cunningham when I learned this usage or slang, and "dumb" was the highest compliment he could pay to any design. If he got really excited he would up it to "that's really stupid" in which case it meant it passed the highest grade.

Adopting this same language as my own became second nature, synonyms for dumb and stupid, in this usage, are

• elegant
• clean
• simple
• obvious

It is extremely confusing to other people, of course, because they aren't in on my inside joke, so I am mis-understood a lot especially when I get all excited about things and start saying stuff like "That's really a dumb program. Works amazingly well, with no effort whatsoever." It is interesting as well how neatly the language transposes to software from construction. Design is everything in construction, and software only more so.

Software

One thing that is pretty funny about software is how smart "dumb" can be. My mentor for almost a decade, Michael Nash, taught me this when I got excited about one of my favorite past times, writing code generators. He was being charitable when he basically informed me that generated code sucks.

"But Michael," I countered, "I am writing stuff in the click of a button that takes other guys days and weeks to write, and it's more consistent and follows conventions from beginning to end."

His response was indirect. "If it can be written with a Code Generator then it shouldn't be written at all, a framework should do it for you." In other words, I had out-smarted myself. No problemo, Senior Nash, I've only spent the last two years of my life specializing in this discipline.

IPOD

Perhaps the most universally accessible example of this whole set of ideas is the IPOD. What makes it successful is that it is a very dumb and simple and clean design.