well yeah, that's the minimalist "KISS" spirit... I guess when you're so much dedicated to what you do, you don't really have time or will to care about details.
I don't think he cares about KISS philosophy. I think he has found what he likes to do and that helps him stay focus and cut noise while most meddle with productivity techniques.
I sincerely believe that programming has gone through a couple of paradigms over the decades. For instance it used to be a good thing to never be scared of architecting a solution from the ground up (and the best often did) whereas nowadays our ecosystem of libraries and tools are so vast that it much more often is overkill, and the architect mentality often a handicap. (This is obviously just one person's opinion)
Sounds principles are sometimes tied to these paradigms. For instance in past years one could maybe say "never use a tool that you don't know well" whereas nowadays with all of the layers of technologies that you are forced to work with it may have changed to just knowing why you have to use a technology and knowing well the aspects that you are using it for.
Also, there are by now many generations of programmers, and we might not want to admit it but the people that grew up on assembly do tend to have different sensibilities than the people that grew up on scripting languages. With these generations often come ingrained mentalities that are tied to paradigms that are tied to principles which in fact are still subject to change.
There is a whole other sector of philosophy that is almost completely divorced from science that is often called "Continental Philosophy". It deals with all of the classic problems -- meaning, love, truth, etc. The U.S. tends to not hear a lot about it, but it's huge in the non-english speaking world. Check it out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_philosophy
For the science-trained reader it can be painful to read. For example a popular rhetorical technique in this area is to take a well-defined scientific idea and use it as if it was a metaphor, then use the metaphor to imply some claim, then claim that the scientific idea entailed the claim.
Also, explaining things in an elliptical and opaque way is often considered OK, since it provides a certain kind of experience for the reader. In the Anglo-American tradition, clarity is an objective, rather than giving off a vibe where you kind of get the idea.
These guys point out some howling examples where technical terms are abused to the point of meaninglessness:
Yup. Modern philosophy is usually divided into Analytic and Continental. Analytic is by far the most common in England (its birthplace) and the US. Continental (as the name implies) is most common in France and Germany. It can be much more abstract. Phenomenology and Existentialism are two strains of Continental philosophy (Husserl for the first, and Heidegger, Sartre, and Kierkegaard for the other.)
I think this shows that standards bodies could implement less native language functionality and let community-made libraries/tools compete for those areas. ES6 goes so far as to implement a native module system, seriously calling into question any effort by the community at large to implement a competing system (e.g. browserify, requirejs).
