To follow on stvn's response, there is a certain amount of complexity inherent to a given system. That complexity has to be dealt with. It cannot be wished or designed away. To illustrate, I once worked for a medical claims company as their web guy. My internal client had this idea that we should reduce the number of mouse clicks. Not a bad plan, except he wanted the user to be able to make three unrelated choices with two mouse clicks. We could have done it, but that would have necessitated tying unrelated ideas together. The complexity was going to come out, no matter what. It's like water in a river. You cannot stop the water - you can only channel it.

Your API change may have simplified your mental model, but would it have simplified the overall model that the author was dealing with? With DBM::Deep, people are constantly asking me for a bunch of optimizations that work extremely well if your process is the only consumer of the DB. Unfortunately, I can't work them in yet because the other use-case is if there are multiple processes accessing the DB. What should I do?

My criteria for good software:
  1. Does it work?
  2. Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?

In reply to Re: API complexity measures by dragonchild
in thread API complexity measures by zby

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