We talk a lot about software complexity, but we rarely define what complexity even *is*. According to John Ousterhout, there are three characteristics of software complexity that need to be avoided (thread): - ThreadSky

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coprodu.to • 60 days ago

We talk a lot about software complexity, but we rarely define what complexity even *is*.

According to John Ousterhout, there are three characteristics of software complexity that need to be avoided (thread):

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coprodu.to•60 days ago

1. Conceptually simple changes require the code to be changed in many different places. There are no or very few changes where you can change a single function or entity and be done.

coprodu.to•60 days ago

2. The developer needs to learn a lot to complete even simple tasks. Every task is "entangled" with a lot of application context, there are no tasks where you can "just drop in and solve it" without having to learn a lot of application-specific concepts.

coprodu.to•60 days ago

3. Given a specific task, it is not clear what parts of code need to be changed in order to complete it. There is no obvious mapping from human-level task descriptions to specific, well-defined parts of code.

coprodu.to•60 days ago

Of course, every codebase exhibits these characteristics to some level, but I believe having concrete definitions of what "complexity" means is the first step toward being able to reduce it.

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