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Most programmers are complexity junkies getting paid to feed their habit.

• pengaru 7y ago
  > Most programmers are complexity junkies getting paid to feed their habit. Maybe more so today, but historically I've come to appreciate programmers as megalomaniacal control freaks - myself included, which programming allows them to exercise within the harmless confines of an imaginary world hosted by microprocessors and the attached storage. It has been evolving though. Computers became networked, now software controls much of the real world, it's far less harmless than before. We also used to strive for minimizing complexity, I'm not sure how much of that was intentional or just a consequence of limited space while RAM was so expensive.
  • jolmg 7y ago
    > We also used to strive for minimizing complexity, I'm not sure how much of that was intentional or just a consequence of limited space while RAM was so expensive. Though I hate to admit it, I think it's the latter. We're now more able to shift complexity. We can add a big complexity layer (a framework, for example, with someone else being responsible for it) to avoid some complexity in another layer. The trouble comes when you need to understand the whole, including the layer you're not responsible for, to understand how that layer is affecting you.