Chiming in to say I agree with the sibling (dead) comment (not sure why it ended up dead).
Djikstra's words (and the article's) are clearly correct, but hardly revolutionary or contrary to modern belief today.
The real question is: why, despite a prevailing belief in modern software software engineering that red diffs are beautiful and cathartic things to be celebrated, and that the great spectre of technical debt is something to be excised, why do complex overengineered systems still prevail despite all this?
Software-as-art has lost a lot of ground to software-as-business, and in software-as-business, somewhere up the chain there is a management-level individual who isn't really sure how to measure either progress or code quality.
There are myriad tools designed for these people though, and they all chose the simplest (and wrong) solutions to the problem: progress is SLOC added and bug reports clsoed per day.
The height of the software-as-art era was the shareware days of the late 90s. Development certainly moved a lot more slowly overall, but there also tended to be better relationships between developers and their users and developers were not yet all working for people who tried to measure their progress by the only metrics they could understand. The entire industry has been a victim of Goodhart's Law.
> There are myriad tools designed for these people though, and they all chose the simplest (and wrong) solutions to the problem: progress is SLOC added and bug reports clsoed per day.
Is the SLOC counting still a thing nowadays, though? I've worked at companies ranging from 4-person startups to an old worldwide behemoth (all in the EU, though) and nobody even tracked SLOC, let alone evaluate developers on that; all the dumb metrics came from the issue tracker. Though I have the impression your real evaluation is based on how well you work with others, assuming you clear a low technical competence bar.
I wish! If there's a good book out about it, I'd love a recommendation too. I lived it though, writing my first "software" as a youth in the mid-80s. I've seen a lot of change in computing. And not all "get off my lawn" bad, just different.
I see software now as having three different faces: software-as-art, software-as-business, and software-as-engineering. The 80s and 90s had a lot of activity in software-as-art. I was mostly following Mac culture at the time, so I saw this through Bungie, Ambrosia, BareBones, and hundreds of smaller indie developers. The environment at the time enforced the software-as-art discipline, because downloading a program happened over 14.4kbps or slower, or 28.8kbps if your parents had good jobs, and came along with yelling that often sounded like, "get off the phone!" "But I'm downloading!" Installation media was 700K or 1.4MB, and that had to have all your code, art, sound, and other resources.
That's mostly all gone now. Bungie of course got married to Microsoft, which pissed off Mac enthusiasts way more than when Jobs announced a partnership with MS to get Office on the Mac. They've done well. Panic are the only old-school indie commercial desktop software developers I can think of off the top of my head that are still pretty true to their roots.
A lot of software of course just became free. I enjoy so much more high quality software at no cost now, which is really only possible because of the massive benefits of scale that have come from all the tools that have trickled down from software-as-business.
Software-as-business really took off. Apple, Microsoft, Sun, Oracle and others were always kinda big, but not the impossibly large megacorps that they are now. Most of them were still vulnerable to serious mistakes, and that was good, because it meant the users still had some power. Now, mistakes in software development don't really matter to these companies unless they impact 8 figures of quarterly revenue, and that's a process that has zero room for software-as-art.
Software-as-engineering is mostly stillborn, languishing in academia or a few places with rigorous standards (like NASA) or still finding its footing in modern DevOps. I still hold out hope that eventually this aspect will get some love too. I think it will be necessary, eventually, but maybe not until after I've written my last line of code.
Two things: lack of having a clue and perverse incentives. The first leads to endless piles of barely functional code; the second rewards that.
The 'real' programmer that spends a month on a long term maintainable chunk of code with a well defined API and some documentation to go with it in a few hundred lines of craftmanship will be at a disadvantage to the person that creates an unmaintainable mess half the time and that is promoted away for being so great at 'getting things done' before they have to deal with the mess.
> why do complex overengineered systems still prevail despite all this?
Well for one, IDE's help hide a lot of the complexity by offering rapid auto-completion for even the most complex of systems.
For two, it's not something you can read and truly grasp. Complexity doesn't necessarily have an objective measurement. Even the attempts we have of measuring it, such as cyclomatic complexity, don't really tell a full story.
You could reduce a somewhat complex string manipulation down to a regex replace. But that regex replace may be far harder for someone to understand what it actually does, even if they're experienced with that particular flavor of regex.
To be blunt, 100 lines of code could be easier to understand than 25 lines that do the exact same thing. It just depends on the reader & the task at hand.
Regarding the sibling dead comment, it is not uncommon that comments are dead from start, not because they were downvoted in this thread.
I don't know, but I imagine it is one of the HN automated moderation actions, based on previous downvotes of that user comments.
There is "vouche" feature to minimize unfairness in these cases. If you do not agree that a particular comment should be dead from start, you can click on the timestamp (to go to the permanent link of the comment) and click on vouche. I do this sometimes. I did now for the mentioned comment (from draw_down ) because I agree with you that it is a valuable comment and it is not dead anymore.
“I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” - Mark Twain
I think this applies to software as well. It’s easier to come up with complex solution, harder to create something simple that still meets the requirements.
IMO, it's due to the Action Bias. Human psychology prefers to take action rather than wait around. Making new code feels more active than deleting code (at least to me).
I can answer from experience. The reason is that generally people can find success by doing one or two things at a time, and then polish them through testing and bug reports. This often means that the wrong things are done for the right reasons, and the debt gets bigger and the value of the system increases. This makes big rewrites really hard.
This locks in the complexity, and inertia makes change expensive. I experienced this when I built a tcp socket over a request response library, and the reason was to capture the investments made in the library and suffer the pain of building tcp. This made the code complex, but it was reasonable to sell to stakeholders and achieve success on. Now, I wanted to just use a socket, but this took 1.5 years to do by slowly iterating on the right value proposition. I'm a big fan of slow massive rewrites, but it requires consistent and solid leadership to pull off.
Djikstra's words (and the article's) are clearly correct, but hardly revolutionary or contrary to modern belief today.
The real question is: why, despite a prevailing belief in modern software software engineering that red diffs are beautiful and cathartic things to be celebrated, and that the great spectre of technical debt is something to be excised, why do complex overengineered systems still prevail despite all this?