The Law of Conservation of Complexity
This post seems wrong in so many ways. For one, there&#x27;s different goals for complexity. Making everyone be an expert machinist for coffee vs pressing a button is about simplification. Then, we look to see what&#x27;s in the box to make that happen. I&#x27;d be surprised if my Mr Coffee[maker] I got for $30 with a few buttons, circuits, and components is that much more complex than first, mechanical coffeemaker. It&#x27;s quite simple in design. Some things got simpler over time while a lot increased in complexity.<p>The next statement is about legacy IT. Not legacy IT and mobile but legacy IT. It&#x27;s systems whose complexity increased for social and economic reasons beneficial to who knows who by now that massively increased complexity for developers and often users too. Was it inherent in solving the problem? No. Not at all. There&#x27;s a small segment of people that regularly post stuff here that&#x27;s simpler, higher-quality, etc than what&#x27;s common. When correct &amp; reasonable complexity are design goals, then one gets software that&#x27;s way simpler than it otherwise would be. The extremes of that are probably Niklaus Wirth&#x27;s Oberon and Chuck Moore&#x27;s Forth. Wirth&#x27;s take on it is below but manageable complexity is something many small players practice. The market doesn&#x27;t reward it very much but it&#x27;s doable.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cr.yp.to&#x2F;bib&#x2F;1995&#x2F;wirth.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cr.yp.to&#x2F;bib&#x2F;1995&#x2F;wirth.pdf</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9733520" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9733520</a><p>Another on Wirth that&#x27;s illustrative of the Web counterpoint is the Juice project. Javascript and Java applets were the mainstream approaches to increasing power of web browsers. Complex, hard to define, relatively slow to interpret&#x2F;compile, and slow runtime. Juice applets were based on Wirth&#x27;s Oberon. It&#x27;s memory-safe, compiles lightening-fast, and runs pretty fast. To deal with dial-up while maintaining type-checks, they compiled the applets to compressed AST&#x27;s that preserved type information that the browser finished compiling into machine code after checking. It went nowhere because inertia and the market but was very simple, safer, and faster.<p>&quot;As you can see, complexity is constant.&quot;<p>No, it&#x27;s probably not. It can be reduced in many cases by changing how you express your ideas. Not to mention simplifying the ideas themselves. Then, just because it moved doesn&#x27;t mean overall complexity isn&#x27;t reduced. Putting complexity in one space to benefit countless users is much less complexity than trying to teach countless users to all do the same, complex thing that must integrate with your backend that must anticipate all the ways it will be abused. So, the complexity of each aspect of the problem and reuse of solutions must be considered. It&#x27;s why high-assurance markets for both security and reliability have focused on putting tons of effort into reusable components they can adapt to new use-cases. Same level of complexity in the component followed by an extension or integration cost. Much less labor and money than clean-slating the whole thing.<p>&quot;For example, think about the jump from Assembly to C; complexity moved to the compiler. Consider how we went from unmanaged languages to garbage collection: complexity moved to the runtime.&quot;<p>A simplistic look. Instead, the nature of the problem changed with solutions proposed. Some were pretty simple. The garbage collection one is a real laugh as getting one, garbage collector right is way easier than getting right all memory-safety right in all programs ever written on that platform. The latter is seemingly-boundless complexity. Likewise, even CompCert compiler (design &amp; ML code not proof) is probably simpler than most applications if you wrote them in assembly language. I can only imagine trying to do Excel that way. Funny thing is I used to use it as an example but later found out they had their own compiler. They found it easier to maintain a whole compiler for themselves than to keep up with the features or breaks in other compilers. It was work but actually reduced the complexity of their problem. Funny stuff.<p>&quot;Then there’s the evolution from waterfall to agile, distributing complexity over time.&quot;<p>There was an evolution from ad-hoc practices to iterative stuff and something like Waterfall depending on shop. Then, there were things like Cleanroom, RAD, and Spiral that did more iterative. Then Agile showed up with extra stuff on top of it with a mix of simplifying and extra complexity. Cleanroom and Spiral kept things simple with Cleanroom forcing basic primitives used in step-wise refinement with human verification of code and usage-based testing. Very low defect on first try for most teams while most other methods were failing. Cleanroom was actually <i>simpler</i> than most methodologies or tooling of the time but more complex than throwing code together.<p>&quot;Every time we took these steps, we were skeptical and afraid because we felt we were losing control.&quot;<p>Many were. Most of it had nothing to do with complexity. Generally, managers forcing something on developers for social and economic reasons. Developers stayed pushing stuff they thought would make things better with mix of evidence and ideology. The main drivers for almost everything.<p>&quot;As promised, here’s the simple rule for deciding how to deal with complexity. Focus on where you can innovate. As for everything else? Just let it go.&quot;<p>Prior articles on HN suggested looking at each component&#x27;s complexity instead. You consider using it only if it works, is well-documented, and straight-forward enough to maintain yourself if they abandon it or make changes you don&#x27;t like. Otherwise, you ignore it. It&#x27;s often that simple. The hard stuff you take time to understand, thoroughly test, document, and use within the bounds of what you&#x27;ve come to understand works. Also, if it&#x27;s a 3rd party, I recommend having multiple options with portable code so you&#x27;re ready to leave at any time with minimal, transition cost. I&#x27;ve seen too many burned by trusting 3rd parties too much.