[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.