March 2012
Beginner
84 pages
2h 12m
English
Content preview from Code SimplicityBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 7. Complexity
When you work as a professional programmer, chances are you’ll know somebody (or you are somebody!) who’s going through this common development horror story: “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 rewrite, 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, Company X wrote a product better than ours much more quickly than we did.”
We know now that the source of these problems is complexity. You start out with a simple project that can be completed in one month. Then you add complexity, and the task will take three months. Then you take each piece of that and make it more complex, and the task will take nine months.
Complexity builds on complexity—it’s not just a linear thing. That is, you can’t make assumptions like: “We have 10 features, so adding 1 more will only add 10 percent more time.” In fact, that one new feature will have to be coordinated with all 10 of your existing features. So, if it takes 10 hours of coding time to implement the feature itself, it may well take another 10 hours of coding time to make the 10 existing features all interact properly with the new feature. The more features there ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.