Stéphane Dalbera posted on LinkedIn: There’s a troubling narrative spreading across LinkedIn:
“To help beginners, we must dumb everything down.”
—
Strip down the language.
Avoid abstractions.
Stick to the bare minimum.
Pretend the standard library barely exists.
—
Let’s call this what it is: The glorification of mediocrity. Link

All of this is sold under the comforting label of “simplicity.”
But in reality, it’s a distortion, a caricature of the KISS principle.

Because simple does not mean primitive.
Familiar does not mean better.
And unfamiliar does not mean complex.

Telling newcomers to avoid expressive features, to ignore decades of accumulated wisdom and tooling, is not kindness. It’s intellectual laziness disguised as empathy.

This mindset insists on writing everything in the smallest, most generic subset of imperative programming.

Why?
Because “anything more might scare the beginners.”

Really?
What a stunning vote of no confidence in people’s ability to learn, grow, and rise to challenges.

We don’t help beginners by shielding them from power.
We help them by teaching them how to use it well.

Because ironically, the code produced under this false “keep it stupidly simple” philosophy is often:
→ Harder to read
→ Easier to break
→ Worse in performance
→ Riddled with re-invented wheels
→ And a maintenance nightmare

This isn’t simplicity.
It’s self-inflicted complexity with a friendly face.

If we want to elevate the craft, and the next generation of developers, we must stop pretending that expressive, idiomatic, well-structured code is “too much” for people to handle.

Respect the language. Respect the learner. Respect the craft.

Master your tools. Read the damn docs. Explore the standard library. Use what the language was designed to offer you.

Because great code isn’t just about making things work.
It’s about making things clear, robust, elegant, and built to last.

We don’t grow by hiding from complexity.
We grow by confronting it, and understanding it.