Essential versus Accidental Complexity: 2 minute Kevlin Henney video and some links
Posted by jpluimers on 2020/12/24
The topic is as old as the 1986 “No Silver Bullet” book, still relevant, but few people are consciously aware of the difference of these fundamental ideas:
Essential versus Accidental Complexity
TL;DR:
- Essential complexity is the problem you try to solve
- Accidental complexity is the problems you have created while solving
The first is what it is all about (it is in your problem domain, and not reducible); the second is what you want to minimise, like technical debt, size effects of quick fixes, bad tool/framework/language choices, long feedback loops.
2 minute video:
Related:
- 1986: No Silver Bullet – Wikipedia
- OOPSLA 2007: [Archive.is] No Silver Bullet: A Retrospective on the Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering (formatted for A4 at [WayBack] (PDF) No silver bullet: a retrospective on the essence and accidents of software engineering.)
- 2008: The Productive Programmer – Neal Ford – Google Books
Via:
- [WayBack] Uživatel ArchBeatDev on Twitteru: „Takin’ it to the street, @KevlinHenney discusses essential and accidental complexity in this #2MTT.
- [WayBack] Kevlin Henney on Twitter: “2 minutes of your time for some simplified complexity… “
–jeroen
https://twitter.com/archbeatdev/status/1083786266339098624
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