The struggle against complexity
As I spend more and more time in the world of enterprise software, I realize that my job as a programmer is a daily struggle against complexity (or complected things). My goal is to break things up into simpler to understand components and then weave them together to form more complex entities.
The trickier part is collaborating with a group of humans who have their own ideas on how to go about doing so! And there lies the trap.
“Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute” - Abelson & Sussman
I have observed that people easily forget this simple adage. Each time I see a twisted piece of code, I wonder whether my fellow humans thought about whether I would be able to read it or not.
And then, it is hard to convince people to change their minds once they have created something, because it ends up becoming more about:
“…my way of doing things is better because its is MINE, and not necessarily because it is BETTER” - me
So today’s note to self:
Strive to achieve simplicity above all else.
