The call for a massive reduction in complexity reminds me of the VPRI "STEPS" project (Alan Kay et al) to build a complete end-user operating system in under 20

The call for a massive reduction in complexity reminds me of the VPRI "STEPS" project (Alan Kay et al) to build a complete end-user operating system in under 20,000 lines of code. Sadly, it looks like the project is dead or over, and the links I've found pointing to it on vpri.org are dead today. Until there's some external stimulus, I don't think the industry is going to change. It's a lot cheaper to add new flashy things if you don't care about complexity (or the consequences of it, like bugs, and security). Getting a consumer to care about the complexity of the software in their computer or phone is like asking a Ruby programmer to care about the microcode in their CPU. It's not that we can't understand the problem but it's not a concern until it gets so bad it impacts my level of abstraction. I'd love to see programs start putting little badges on their webpages that brag about how few lines of code they have, how low their cyclomatic complexity is, or how short their dependency tree is. I'm terrible at marketing but surely there's a way to make this sound appealing.