easier said.

Seth Godin recently wrote about the importance of being on time. He used special emphasis when he wrote:

Boy that’s simple. Apparently, it’s incredibly difficult.

I’ve been paying more attention to this attitude lately, this assertion of what is easy. Recently on the Shoes mailing list somebody wrote the following(details omitted for clarity of the point here):

I was wondering if shoes could [do this cool thing]. [The system]
natively supports [this other cool thing that would be helpful for the aforementioned, desired but as yet unrealised cool thing], so it couldn’t be very hard…

Godin asserts that being on time and respecting the time of others is easy. This fellow on the Shoes list asserts that adding some desired behavior to his programs couldn’t be very hard. If the former were true, Godin wouldn’t have much of a blog post. If the latter were true, the fellow probably would have fixed his problems instead of going to the group at large for support.

Honoring others at all times is not easy. Programming is not easy. Many things in life are not easy. Sure, people make things harder than they have to be sometimes, but I think most love an easy win, too. Perhaps there just aren’t as many out there as we’d sometimes like to think.