Software Complexity Issues

Second System Syndrome! :)https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect

I've heard similar stuff about the Dutch iDEAL [1] system. It's probably true of a lot of complex software systems. These things always remind me of Jonathan Blow's talk (I think here [2]) about the collapse of civilization.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDEAL [2] https://www.yo

I wish I could upvote this comment more than once.Many complex systems are complex because they solve complex problems, not just because they have evolved over time from different simple conditions. You can't always (if ever) replace a complex system with a simple one. You can't escape complexity by coding around it. This is the attitude that killed Netscape and kills many Enterprise projects.

No, it's indicative of the complexity of the system.Please show other similarly complex systems with fewer bugs: basically doesn't happen.

99 cases out of a 100 it's a "configuration change" in a very large system that's so large and complex nobody can comprehend it anymore. Decentralize, folks.

"big software project"there you are why its failling, the fact that these system is overly massive and complex that sometimes the original creator and architecture that design this system cant foresee the future needs and etcYou could says its incompetence but the fact that software change so much is last 20 years make it most people cant really design a "future proof" system in a way that it cant cause trouble in the future

i feel like we keep running into these problems repeatedly with a lot of our “disruptive” tech. scaling problems that come with usage in the real world. they’re “disruptive” until it gets to actual scale of the thing it was disrupting and reality smacks it around.many of our complex systems are bloated because the problems consist of a lot of tiny problems that require a complex and often messy bloat to solve.i already see this “let’s just rebuild it” attitude about some large sof

1. This system is too complicated and messy, we need to throw it away and rebuild it from scratch.2. This new system is so simple and works perfectly.3. Hmm, it doesn't account for this one problem. Doesn't matter, we can just iterate and add in a special case.Repeat 3 a few hundred/thousand times.4. This system is too complicated and messy, we need to throw it away and rebuild it from scratch.

It sounds like a few software projects I've worked on. Incorrect base assumptions and not swapping out the components that were made unwieldy by those assumptions not reflecting reality.

"But when you add them all together, you end up with a terribly laggy affair"I think this is the key.People fall in love with simple systems which solves a problem. Being totally in honey moon they want to use those systems for additional use cases. So they build stuff around it, atop of it, abstract the original system to allow growth for more complexity.Then the system becomes too complex, so people might come up with a new idea. So they create a new simple system just to fi