Science & Tech Quote by Wietse Venema

“Simple and stupid” sounds like an insult until you hear it the way Wietse Venema means it: as a security philosophy, almost a dare. In Postfix, the goal isn’t clever code; it’s code that’s too boring to betray you. That phrasing deliberately punctures the tech industry’s reflex to equate sophistication with strength. Venema, a security scientist, is arguing the opposite: complexity is the real attack surface, and elegance in security often looks like refusal.

The intent is practical, not aesthetic. Postfix is famously modular: separate processes, tight interfaces, least privilege, clear boundaries. “Simple and stupid” is shorthand for minimizing what any one component can do, so when something fails (and it will), the blast radius is small. The subtext is a critique of the “hero programmer” mindset where intelligence is measured by how many edge cases you can juggle in a single monolith. Venema’s model measures intelligence by how many edge cases you can delete.

Context matters: Postfix emerged as a safer alternative to Sendmail, the sprawling, historically fragile backbone of email. In that ecosystem, one exotic feature or one overly trusted daemon can become a global incident. Venema’s line reads like a lab note turned credo: treat software as guilty until proven constrained.

It works because it’s blunt. “Secure by design” can be branding. “Simple and stupid” is a discipline, and an accusation: if your system needs genius to operate, it probably needs genius to exploit.