> The problem is I'd rather make a medium size changes to a simple system than a minor change to a complex system. Spending one hour thinking to make a one-lin

> The problem is I'd rather make a medium size changes to a simple system than a minor change to a complex system. Spending one hour thinking to make a one-line change might not feel productive if one is used to just hacking away, but, IMHO, it is a net win by some orders of magnitude (assuming we are working on some software with solid abstractions). > And this doesn't sound like a simple system. Unless one understands it, in which case that list sounds like a collection of solutions/patterns one would come up with after the n-th rewrite anyway. If, and that is were we often fail, we manage to document the design decisions adequately, code can be easier to read as well.