"try rather hard to keep things boringly simple" Good engineering does mean keeping things boringly simple. You should only make things complex to hit a perfor

"try rather hard to keep things boringly simple" Good engineering does mean keeping things boringly simple. You should only make things complex to hit a performance target, match complex requirements, or avoid greater complexity somewhere else. Some types of complexity are subjective. If you need to parse something, bison/yacc is often a great choice; but for a simple grammar I could see how someone who doesn't know it could say it introduces needless complexity. Programming is writing, and like all writing, you are communicating with some audience (in the case of software, it's other developers). If you lose track of who you are writing for, you'll not succeed.