Complexity Kills

Posted on March 12, 2008
Filed Under Computer Science |

Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling—the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration. Possibly this trend results from a mistaken belief that using a somewhat mysterious device confers an aura of power on the user.

~Niklaus Wirth, creator of Pascal.

I couldn’t find a source for this, but I could find that Bruce Schneier quotes part of it in his book “Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World“. If I’m in error, at least I’m in good company.

Popularity: 16% [?]

Comments

2 Responses to “Complexity Kills”

  1. Greg on March 13th, 2008 9:55 am

    Isn’t this why we use Community Server at our nameless place of work?

  2. Daniel on March 13th, 2008 10:17 am

    I think it may be important to note a couple of things here:
    - The cultural context: Complexity is regarded as more/less “valuable” in various cultures
    - Complexity is also a word describing “complex relationships” - a good number of times these two terms are confused
    - Complexity is sometimes a natural state that occurs when systems try to adapt themselves to serve various different populations. The complimentary state is that of design seeking to simplify this complexity. Together they are two states in a cycle of simplicity-complexity. I’ve been calling this cycle “simplexity” to remind myself that both of these are “natural” and perhaps even necessary states in a larger cycle.

Leave a Reply