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Complexity is the natural consequence of software becoming more efficient, addressing more use cases and avoiding edge cases. It's not problematic intrinsically

Complexity is the natural consequence of software becoming more efficient, addressing more use cases and avoiding edge cases. It's not problematic intrinsically, it's just hard, because the problem space is hard. > Ironically, I've found that using weaker tools can help with complexity. It's hard to write a complicated C program because it can't do very much. I can't say I agree with this assessment.

qclibre22 3y ago
How about : "write your code so that someone else can easily port it to another language" ?
adamrezich 3y ago
Some complexity is unavoidable when creating software that does complex things—this is a tautology that goes without saying. Unnecessary complexity is largely caused by software developers who are currently in the middle of the bell curve of experience, who think that programming computers is all about finding the most clever way to solve a problem, usually by utilizing the most advanced language features they've learned about and/or by making systems as generic as possible, as opposed to writing instructions for the computer to operate on data as simply and efficiently as possible. In my experience, every good software developer goes through an "adolescent" phase where they get caught up in doing things as "cleverly" as possible, completely blind to the unnecessary complexity they're creating in the process. There may be somebody out there who has avoided this phase of learning the craft, but if there is, I haven't met them. Part of me thinks that "getting it out of your system" is an important part of learning to get better at the craft.
verdagon 3y ago
Perhaps. The problem space's difficulty can bring some inherent complexity, yes... but I often hear that fact used to justify adding complexity that isn't actually necessary. Biggest example I've seen: wanting to use Java for a web server where a 10-line node server did wonderfully. Or similarly, wanting to use async/await in Rust when threads are more than sufficient. Sometimes I think we make our problems unnecessarily complex by chasing efficiency perfection.
- raffraffraff 3y ago
  Ugh, Java for small, dirt simple microservices is such a pain. They always seem to take too long to start up, use too much memory, and have horrible logs. And the containers are large because of the jvm.

qclibre22 3y ago

How about : "write your code so that someone else can easily port it to another language" ?

adamrezich 3y ago

Some complexity is unavoidable when creating software that does complex things—this is a tautology that goes without saying. Unnecessary complexity is largely caused by software developers who are currently in the middle of the bell curve of experience, who think that programming computers is all about finding the most clever way to solve a problem, usually by utilizing the most advanced language features they've learned about and/or by making systems as generic as possible, as opposed to writing instructions for the computer to operate on data as simply and efficiently as possible. In my experience, every good software developer goes through an "adolescent" phase where they get caught up in doing things as "cleverly" as possible, completely blind to the unnecessary complexity they're creating in the process. There may be somebody out there who has avoided this phase of learning the craft, but if there is, I haven't met them. Part of me thinks that "getting it out of your system" is an important part of learning to get better at the craft.

verdagon 3y ago

Perhaps. The problem space's difficulty can bring some inherent complexity, yes... but I often hear that fact used to justify adding complexity that isn't actually necessary. Biggest example I've seen: wanting to use Java for a web server where a 10-line node server did wonderfully. Or similarly, wanting to use async/await in Rust when threads are more than sufficient. Sometimes I think we make our problems unnecessarily complex by chasing efficiency perfection.

raffraffraff 3y ago
Ugh, Java for small, dirt simple microservices is such a pain. They always seem to take too long to start up, use too much memory, and have horrible logs. And the containers are large because of the jvm.