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People who disagree aren't trying to make things complex

m50d.github.io

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Re: People who disagree aren't trying to make things complex

#31

Post by lmm »

kgwxd wrote: post #28

So, we should just "agree to disagree" and stop trying to demonstrate how one approach might be much better over another? How can anything ever get better? The Complexity Trap didn't accuse anyone of actively trying to make things complex, nor did it imply any "moral failings" on anyone's part, it just gave examples of how common practices can cause accidental complexity. It also dedicates an entire section to defini…

> So, we should just "agree to disagree" and stop trying to demonstrate how one approach might be much better over another? How can anything ever get better?

No, we should try to make things better. But framing these choices as "complexity" doesn't seem to be helpful. The choices are tradeoffs but they're not a deliberate choice of complexity for the sake of some other value; at most they're choices between different kinds of complexity, and maybe not even that much.

> It also dedicates an entire section to defining "complexity" as used throughout, so there's no ambiguity there.

And yet I used that same definition but came to opposite conclusions when applying it to the original author's examples.

Re: People who disagree aren't trying to make things complex

#33

Post by kens »

dmreedy wrote: post #20
jgtrosh wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you're fighting for speed on your code, it ends up feeling like what you're describing of that engineering world. Your techniques have to adapt to what is actually happening in the lower layers. When you're fighting for ease of use, you can't make your users forget their preconceptions, you have to adapt to these externalities. I think sometimes engineering and software development have different degrees of free…

Agreed, there's definitely a continuum as you go lower down the stack; in the same way that the first programmers were often electrical engineers (with due deference to Ada Lovelace).

Are you thinking of any early electrical engineer programmers in particular? The impression I got was that early programmers for scientific applications were largely mathematicians and scientists (e.g. Hopper, Turing, ENIAC programmers, von Neumann), while business programming was more office / business people.

Re: People who disagree aren't trying to make things complex

#34

Post by taneq »

0xdeadbeefbabe wrote: post #4
ilaksh wrote: post #3

A big part of this is that programmers have different programming worldviews. Many people seem to be unaware that worldviews are not perfect rational easily modifiable constructions but are instead foundational structures that thinking builds upon automatically. Programmers are about as unlikely to easily change their programming worldviews as they are to change their political beliefs. Which is not to say that progr…

Have you seen the mkdir world view? It's the one where all the code is spread out over as many directories as possible, and leaf directories typically have no siblings just yet and one child.

I think this is a special case of the 'simpler is better as absurdum' approach, where you only ever write 1-3 line functions, each in their own file, because they're 'simple'.

Of course, this really just moves the complexity to the composition of these functions and destroys locality of reference for anyone trying to read it.

Re: People who disagree aren't trying to make things complex

#35

Post by stevenjohns »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #29
austincheney wrote: post #9

I deliberately try to make things complex, but not more complex than they actually are, though apparently this is received as a matter of perception. It commonly boils down to risk or performance versus convenience. As a senior developer I notice that juniors will sometimes do everything in their power to over-simplify a given problem. This is more often due to insecurity than accident or technical ignorance and whil…

That's funny because I have become, and observe the exact opposite. The notion of trying to make things more complex than they need to be I find deeply problematic. Junior engineers often end up devising solutions which are in fact too complex as they try to over engineer everything. The more experience I have, the more I accept that code is complexity and cost and that it should be avoided. Always take the easy path…

> Junior engineers often end up devising solutions which are in fact too complex as they try to over engineer everything.

> The more experience I have, the more I accept that code is complexity and cost and that it should be avoided.

At a previous company I worked for I proposed a solution which was considered to be too "complex" by the VP R&D. So he and another "Senior" turned around and rewrote it into something more "simple."

This "simplicity" slowly turned into a constantly patched clusterfuck of a mess and it stripped off a dozen different ways of customization. The "simplicity" was produced as a consequence of both of the Senior engineer's ignorance towards to the tools (language, frameworks) we were using and they just went with their gut experience on it.

I'm somewhat different to you I guess. As things go on, I realise that simplicity is usually a hallmark of developers who don't really understand the tools they're working with and can't really foresee where the business would be going with that feature in 12 to 24 months.

It's a symptom of "Jira culture," where people develop things exclusively to satisfy their ticket and ignore the bigger picture of what they're actually trying to achieve.

This is not to discount people over-engineering things, but over-engineering is very different from complexity.

Re: People who disagree aren't trying to make things complex

#38

Post by alexandercrohde »

I have to pretty much reject this post wholesale. True the post it's disagreeing with picked weak examples. But other than that pretty much all of its overall points were actually very accurate.

The original article was not about json/scala/etc. It was about this:

To summarize, we have to deal with a lot of accidental complexity these days, for multiple reasons. First of all, we adopt techniques and abstractions without analying and evaluating their costs and their usefulness in our specific situation. Moreover, we love solving technological problems.

Re: People who disagree aren't trying to make things complex

#39

Post by brabara »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #30
googlemike wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment feels like a markov chain wrote it. Do you really find parallels between this anecdote and reality? What if we presented an anecdote of the opposite to you, would you change your worldview entirely? If not, why should anyone who reads this?

+100 points for that analogy. "Your prose reads like a Markov Chain". That is Gold. I'm putting that on a T-Shirt.

Could you provide a link without a referral?
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