Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and
education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells
better.
Edsger Dijkstra
Code is complex. Complexity is a battle that we all have to fight daily.
Of course, your code is great, isn’t it? It’s other people’s code that
is complex.
Well, no. Not always. Admit it. It’s all too easy to write something
complicated. It happens when you’re not paying attention. It happens
when you don’t plan ahead sufficiently. It happens when you start
working on a “simple” problem, but soon you’ve discovered so many corner
cases that your simple algorithm has grown to reflect a labyrinth, ready
to entrap an unwary programmer.
My observation is that software complexity stems from three main
sources. Blobs. And lines.
And what you get when you combine them: people.
In this chapter, we’ll take a look at each of these and see what we can
learn about writing better software.
Blobs
The first part of software complexity we should consider relates to
blobs: that is, the components we write. The size and number of those blobs
determine complexity.
Some software complexity is a natural consequence of size; the larger a project becomes, the more blobs we need, the harder it ...
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