[BasilInc]

Brooks makes reference to this at some point in a later edition of the book, and about the confusion the word choice caused.

By accidental, he means "non-fundamental complexity". If you express a simple idea in a complex way, the accidental complexity of what you said will be high, because what you said was complex. But the essential complexity is low, because the idea is simple.

Anniversary edition, p182.

"... let us examine its difficulties. Following Aristotle, I divide them into essence - the difficulties inherent in the nature of the software - and accidents - those difficulties that today attends its production but that are not inherent"

[glimshe]

I wonder why people no longer write technical books with this level of erudition and insight; all I see is "React for dummies" and "Mastering AI in Python" stuff (which are useful things, but not timeless)

[skydhash]

You have to look at fundamental books to get there like Designing Data-Intensive Applications or Software Development Pearls (Karl Wiegers)

[steveBK123]

Because, let's be fair, most of us STEM people are no longer educated in the classics the way some were 50 years ago.

[__mharrison__]

I'm actually writing a book right now, Effective Visualization, and I'll explain why. It is a book focused on Matplotlib and Pandas.

I have almost a dozen viz books. Some written over 50 years ago.

While they impart knowledge, I want the knowledge but also the application. I'm going to go out and paint that bike shed. You can go read Tufte or "Show me the Numbers" but I will show you how to get the results.