[rho4]

Not sure if tools and technologies can solve accidental complexity.

In my opinion, a system that has been stable for years isn't 'mature' in a good sense. An exceptional system is one that can still change after many years in production.

I believe this is almost impossible to achieve for enterprise software, because nobody has incentive to make the (huge) investment into longterm maintainability and changeability.

For me, consistent systematic naming and prefixes/suffixes to make names unique are a hint that a person is thinking about this or has experience with maintaining old systems. This has a huge effect on how well you can search, analyze, find usages, understand, replace, change.

[buggymcbugfix]

You can't say...

> Not sure if tools and technologies can solve accidental complexity.

... and then say

> For me, consistent systematic naming and prefixes/suffixes to make names unique are a hint that a person is thinking about this or has experience with maintaining old systems. This has a huge effect on how well you can search, analyze, find usages, understand, replace, change.

I have battle scars from refactoring legacy systems where my predecessors did _not_ consistently or uniquely name things and I would not have seen it through without my sidekick, the type checker!

[rho4]

I guess I wanted to say that no tool/technology can prevent people from creating chaos (or make up for bad/non-existant processes). People need to do that. Of course, systematic people use tools as well. But you can't expect to buy or mandate a tool/technology and expect your system to then automatically have these qualities.

[buggymcbugfix]

That is true! The system I mentioned above, which I had to refactor, was written in the worst Haskell that I've ever seen and nobody at the company dared touch it with a 10-foot pole.