The fact that complexity has to exist is obvious. The real question of design, especially the design and organization of computer programs, is where that compl

The fact that complexity has to exist is obvious. The real question of design, especially the design and organization of computer programs, is where that complexity lives, and how do you organize that complexity so that it doesn't introduce extra complexity. Usually the way we handle this is through layers, with the initial layers being simple, the middle layers being complex and the top layers being simple again. There's no theory about why this is better, it is just usually how it's done and it seems to work when we can pull it off. The bottom layers are your primitives and axioms. Simple building blocks. This is where designers want to create a most minimal and simple set of tools that can help facilitate unlimited complexity at the upper layers (Think a minimal set of language primitives that allow for Turing completeness) The middle layers are your theorems. Different permutations and compositions of your axioms to implement things like business logic or whatever logic you want. This is where good designers should try to stuff as much complexity into as possible. The Top and final layer is the interface. Something that is built to directly access the middle layer while providing an interface that is simple and more understandable from the perspective of a user. This is probably the least theoretical aspect of the stack as you have to factor in things like art and human psychology into how you build an interface. A good example of this will be your phone. The primitives are assembly language instructions, RISC. The middle layer is all the code that facilitates programming and applications and the interface layer is the touch screen. Note that you don't have to look at it from a birds eye view from CPU instructions all the way to touch screen. You can zoom in and look at just a web stack: Java on the backend all the way up to react on the front end. By zooming in you will see systems that violate the design principle I describe. Java as a primitive has become incredibly bloated and so has React and the javascript tool chain. There are several reasons for why this happens: Lack of planning, optimization requirements inevitably violate design principles, lack of knowledge, lack of central direction and more. Either way, always remember that the ideal design that most people should strive for is complexity sandwiched by simplicity at the primitive layer and the interface layer. This goes for most things within computer programming and outside of it, like your car.