I thought the unix quote on simple vs correct is regarding things like "what should the kernel do when a process is processing a system call like read/write and needs to handle a signal. should it return an error of type EAGAIN, or somehow completely shield the user-space program of this condition?".
> This may have been true in an era when every site had to roll a homegrown solution for pert-near everything that didn't come with the base OS, but in this era of open source it is far more important for the implementation to be correct, because the Right Thing can be written once and everybody can use it, and save themselves the accumulated hours of frustration incurred by simple-but-subtly-incorrect implementations.
The BSDs and linux are open source, but we still must check for EAGAIN.
http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html
> This may have been true in an era when every site had to roll a homegrown solution for pert-near everything that didn't come with the base OS, but in this era of open source it is far more important for the implementation to be correct, because the Right Thing can be written once and everybody can use it, and save themselves the accumulated hours of frustration incurred by simple-but-subtly-incorrect implementations.
The BSDs and linux are open source, but we still must check for EAGAIN.