> If the software base is full of gotchas and unintended side-effects then the source of the problem is in unclean separation of concerns and tight coupling.
Do you know how you get such a system? When you start with a simple system and instead of redesigning it to reflect the complexity you just keep the simple system working while extending it to shoehorn the features it needs to meet the requirements.
We get this all the time, specially when junior developers join a team. Inexperienced developers are the first ones complaining about how things are too complex for what they do. More often than not that just reflects opinionated approached to problem domains they are yet to understand. Because all problems are simple once you ignore all constraints and requirements.
Indeed and I have seen it happen many times in my career.
Shoehorning things into working systems is something I have seen juniors do. I have also seen "seniors" do this, but in my view, they are still juniors with more years working on the same code base.
I have once heard it described as "n-years of 1 year experiences". In other words, such a person never learns that program design space must continuously be explored and that recurrence of bugs in the same part of code usually means that a different design is required. They never learn that cause of the bug was not that particular change that caused the unintended side effect but that the fact that there is a side effect is a design bug onto its own.
I do agree, though, that TFA may be proposing sticking with simpler design for longer than advisable.
Do you know how you get such a system? When you start with a simple system and instead of redesigning it to reflect the complexity you just keep the simple system working while extending it to shoehorn the features it needs to meet the requirements.
We get this all the time, specially when junior developers join a team. Inexperienced developers are the first ones complaining about how things are too complex for what they do. More often than not that just reflects opinionated approached to problem domains they are yet to understand. Because all problems are simple once you ignore all constraints and requirements.