[gnat]

Larry Wall said something like "if you have a complex problem, the complexity will come up somewhere -- either you have a complex language and a simple program, or a simple language and a complex problem. The complexity can't be wished away." Being Larry, he said it far better but I can't find the exact quote.

All programming is making models: representing a chaotic and changing analog world in bits, data structures, and algorithms. For every model there's something that breaks that model. Attempting to incorporate every exception into your model leads you to the path of tuples + a workflow engine, and at that point all you've done is build a different database and programming language and move the complexity further up the stack.

As requirements change, the model you built will no longer prove appropriate because now you're modeling different situations. There's an art to building a model that doesn't box you in to the point where the first change request doesn't break your model. But at some point, every model is going to be inadequate.

A senior programmer brings to this: knowing the common ways things change, the costs of changing different types of model, and the understanding that there's no such thing as Perfect so don't proclaim your framework to be such.

[partdavid]

So many times I've had people regurgitate this blog post[1], or KISS, or some other general piece of advice to "keep things simple" and it just means they want to influence the shell game of managing complexity so the complexity is someone else's problem--and they can stop thinking about it. I've come to really hate when someone pulls this out as some general principle, because it so frequently means they want to push complexity from an implementation (which maybe has a hope of hiding some of the complexity) out into callers or configurations or some other kind of leaf, where it becomes a breeding ground for manually synchronized configurations, copy-and-paste code promotion (not reuse, which is bad enough, but the pattern where some thing that you're forcing people to manually compile or explode has to be copy-and-modified through an artifact promotion.

Frankly, KISS and its ilk have become more often "things uninsightful people say to make them sound clever and vaguely iconoclastic" than something that can be actually useful as guidance: because people think they remove nuance rather than adding it (KISS is great if you honor its nuances like "and no simpler..." and "considered as a whole"; but instead it's a thought-terminating cliché). I've heard people use these sound bites to justify, e.g., the entire notion of automated testing (too complicated), or "infrastructure as code"--though I also dislike this term and favor "software-defined infrastructure", though maybe if it became popular, objections that software-defined infrastructure isn't really software would become as common as objections that infrastructure-as-code isn't really code.

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[1] I don't mean this literal blog post, I mean the same kinds of "don't be too clever" platitudes.

[amanvir_]

The “waterbed theory” is probably what you’re looking for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterbed_theory

[gnat]

That's the one, thanks. I knew he said it better :-)

[thom]

Very well put. Effective businesses are good at communicating and sharing these models so everyone is able to reason about them, and if they’re lucky anticipate future articulation points.