Code Simplicity

When you work as a professional programmer, you almost always know somebody (or are somebody) who’s going through one of the most common development horror stories in the book:

“We started working on this project five years ago, and the technology we were using/making was modern then, but it’s obsolete now. Things keep getting more and more complex with this obsolete technology, so it keeps getting less and less likely that we’ll ever finish the project. But if we re-write, we could be here for another five years!”

Another popular one is: “We can’t develop fast enough to keep up with modern user needs.” Or, “While we were developing, Google wrote a product better than ours much faster than us.”

When I hear things like that, the first thing I ask myself is “How did that happen? Why did it take so long for them to finish their product that they ran into that problem?”

The answer lies in complexity. (Read More…)