See also minimalism.
KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid!; also KISR, keep it simple, retard) is a minimalist design philosophy that favors simplicity, both internal and external, technology that is as simple as possible to achieve given task. This philosophy doesn't primarily stem from laziness or a desire to rush something (though these are completely valid reasons too), but mainly from the fact that higher complexity comes with increasingly negative effects such as the cost of development, cost of maintenance, greater probability of bugs and failure, more dependencies etc.
WATCH OUT: various scum has started to ride on the wave of the "KISS" trend and abuse the term, twisting its true meaning; for example GNU/Linux Mint has started to market itself as "KISS" -- that's of course ridiculous and all Mint developers are cretins and idiots. Maximum INTERNAL simplicity is a necessary prerequisite for the KISS philosophy, anything that's just simple on the outside is a mere harmful pseudominimalism -- you may as well use a Mac.
Under dystopian capitalism simple technology, such as simple software, has at least one more advantage connected to "intellectual property": a simple solution is less likely to step on a patent landmine because such a simple solution will either be hard to patent or as more obvious will have been discovered and patented sooner and the patent is more likely to already be expired. So in this sense KISS technology is legally safer.
Apparently the term KISS originated in the US Army plane engineering: the planes needed to be repairable by stupid soldiers with limited tools under field conditions.
Examples of KISS "solutions" include:
SDL
, which prevents collisions with user identifiers.Compared to suckless, Unix philosophy and LRS, KISS is a more general term and isn't tied to any specific group or movement, it doesn't imply any specifics but rather the general overall idea of simplicity being an advantage (less is more, worse is better, ...).
KISS Linux is an example of software developed under this philosophy and adapting the term itself.
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