If you agree with her hypothesis, what it's basically saying is that a clean design tends to feel like much more work early on. And she goes on to suggest that early on, it's best to focus on ease, and extract a simpler design later, when you have a clearer grasp of the problem domain.
Personally, if I disagree, it's because I think her axes are wrong. It's not functionality vs. time, it's cumulative effort vs. functionality. Where that distinction matters is that her graph subtly implies that you'll keep working on the software at a more-or-less steady pace, indefinitely. This suggests that there will always be a point where it's time to stop and work out a simple design. If it's effort vs. functionality, on the other hand, that leaves open the possibility that the project will be abandoned or put into maintenance mode long before you hit that design payoff threshold.
(This would also imply that, as the maintainer of a programming language ecosystem and a database product that are meant to be used over and over again, Rich Hickey is looking at a different cost/benefit equation from those of us who are working on a bunch of smaller, limited-domain tools. My own hand-coded data structures are nowhere near as thoroughly engineered as Clojure's collections API, nor should they be.)
If you agree with her hypothesis, what it's basically saying is that a clean design tends to feel like much more work early on. And she goes on to suggest that early on, it's best to focus on ease, and extract a simpler design later, when you have a clearer grasp of the problem domain.
Personally, if I disagree, it's because I think her axes are wrong. It's not functionality vs. time, it's cumulative effort vs. functionality. Where that distinction matters is that her graph subtly implies that you'll keep working on the software at a more-or-less steady pace, indefinitely. This suggests that there will always be a point where it's time to stop and work out a simple design. If it's effort vs. functionality, on the other hand, that leaves open the possibility that the project will be abandoned or put into maintenance mode long before you hit that design payoff threshold.
(This would also imply that, as the maintainer of a programming language ecosystem and a database product that are meant to be used over and over again, Rich Hickey is looking at a different cost/benefit equation from those of us who are working on a bunch of smaller, limited-domain tools. My own hand-coded data structures are nowhere near as thoroughly engineered as Clojure's collections API, nor should they be.)