Needless complexity is one of my least favorite bugaboos. My mantra tends to be "Do the simplest possible thing that will work first, and iterate from there".

Needless complexity is one of my least favorite bugaboos. My mantra tends to be "Do the simplest possible thing that will work first, and iterate from there". For some reason it is hard to get that across, and some people seem to delight in producing baroque heaps of code for simple tasks, which then often doesn't work correctly.