<story><title>Software Complexity Is Killing Us</title><url>https://www.simplethread.com/software-complexity-killing-us/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>blunte</author><text>Blah &lt;i&gt;bullshit&lt;/i&gt; blah.&lt;p&gt;The reason software is so complex now is that our expectations as users is orders of magnitude higher than it was &amp;quot;in the good old days&amp;quot;.  I&amp;#x27;m old enough to remember the good old days, so I can speak with a little authority here.&lt;p&gt;The Pareto principle may not be exactly accurate, but it describes many situations quite well.  And in software, it fits very well.  80% of the requirements take about 20% of the code (and complexity).  It&amp;#x27;s the edge and special cases that add the bulk of the work.&lt;p&gt;When a program just did one useful thing, we humans would do our human thing and integrate several different programs with our manual effort.  If an edge case appeared, we didn&amp;#x27;t even identify it as an edge case - we&amp;#x27;re built for handling edge cases!  We just made the minor _human_ judgement and fixed the data and pushed it into the next program.&lt;p&gt;Software is complex because we&amp;#x27;re trying to make it replace more human activity.  And beyond the core functionality, human activity is all about applying human judgement.  If anyone is familiar with people training people on a particular task, particularly the quaint concept of apprenticeship, it involves teaching and showing and mentoring until a student has enough knowledge AND wisdom to get the job done.&lt;p&gt;So to boil it down, modern software is primarily complex because it attempts to replicate human judgement and wisdom.&lt;p&gt;That software complexity is not killing us.  It may be a pain in the ass, but if anyone can remember what it was like before we had these tools, I would dare to say that it&amp;#x27;s still a whole lot better than before computers.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ravenstine</author><text>I disagree. Users, in reality, don&amp;#x27;t care about all the crap that stakeholders and some developers care about. They don&amp;#x27;t care about Material design, fancy animations, beautiful buttons, &amp;quot;elegant&amp;quot; code,a ton of niche features, mobile apps(no I&amp;#x27;m not kidding), your annoying push notifications, your fancy menu bars that you also fix to the top of the screen for whatever reason, your autoplay videos, your little &amp;quot;delightful&amp;quot; asides that interrupt the content, etc. They want something that &lt;i&gt;works&lt;/i&gt; without much effort or worry that the software will fail, and that doesn&amp;#x27;t necessarily have to do with how fancy or feature rich an app is.&lt;p&gt;Craigslist and the Quartz app are just a few examples of what I&amp;#x27;m talking about. Nobody except maybe some stakeholders ever asked for those things to be more fancy than they are. They are simple and they work. The end.&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, we are in an era where everyone wants to be like Google, or at least thinks they need to. I do not believe that the rest of the world would be worse off if they stopped spending time making &amp;quot;production ready&amp;quot; software that visually competes with the Big 5.&lt;p&gt;Software becomes complex because we allow it to become complex. Just because you can add another feature doesn&amp;#x27;t mean that you now have more value for a finite amount of pay for X developer time. Companies seem often blind to continual costs for support that go up every time each time the solution is to add a new feature or software package for a small segment of the customer base or the company itself.&lt;p&gt;Whomever is in charge should acquiesce less often. But everyone wants to be a wizard.</text></comment>
<story><title>Software Complexity Is Killing Us</title><url>https://www.simplethread.com/software-complexity-killing-us/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>blunte</author><text>Blah &lt;i&gt;bullshit&lt;/i&gt; blah.&lt;p&gt;The reason software is so complex now is that our expectations as users is orders of magnitude higher than it was &amp;quot;in the good old days&amp;quot;.  I&amp;#x27;m old enough to remember the good old days, so I can speak with a little authority here.&lt;p&gt;The Pareto principle may not be exactly accurate, but it describes many situations quite well.  And in software, it fits very well.  80% of the requirements take about 20% of the code (and complexity).  It&amp;#x27;s the edge and special cases that add the bulk of the work.&lt;p&gt;When a program just did one useful thing, we humans would do our human thing and integrate several different programs with our manual effort.  If an edge case appeared, we didn&amp;#x27;t even identify it as an edge case - we&amp;#x27;re built for handling edge cases!  We just made the minor _human_ judgement and fixed the data and pushed it into the next program.&lt;p&gt;Software is complex because we&amp;#x27;re trying to make it replace more human activity.  And beyond the core functionality, human activity is all about applying human judgement.  If anyone is familiar with people training people on a particular task, particularly the quaint concept of apprenticeship, it involves teaching and showing and mentoring until a student has enough knowledge AND wisdom to get the job done.&lt;p&gt;So to boil it down, modern software is primarily complex because it attempts to replicate human judgement and wisdom.&lt;p&gt;That software complexity is not killing us.  It may be a pain in the ass, but if anyone can remember what it was like before we had these tools, I would dare to say that it&amp;#x27;s still a whole lot better than before computers.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jetheredge</author><text>Author here... we talk a lot at our company about essential complexity and incidental&amp;#x2F;accidental complexity. Software is complex, absolutely. It is complex because business and reality are complex. I think that is inescapable. What we can try to escape though is the incidental complexity that we add to our systems while we are following trends or chasing down shiny new tools.</text></comment>