[btbuildem]

I believe the complexity is inherent, and we haven't yet found a way to handle it gracefully.

I'd like to note that "simple software" means a different thing to the developer, and to the user. And in the grand scheme of things, the developer and all the code he wrote is highly irrelevant. We'd like to think we are, but how much does it really matter what kind of trowel the mason used, and how clean he kept it? What matters is the cathedral he built, the feel of the space within, the durability of the walls.

In my view, the complexity is closely related to scale. I'd like to draw a parallel with nature, where things scale linearly up to some critical point, at which a system goes through reorganization and only then continues to grow. I think mimicking this phenomenon can be a path towards software simplicity.