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Re:Software Entropy by gandalfgeek on Wednesday June 24, 2020 @11:55PM (#23636754)
This view is too simplistic. I've come to the realization that ultimately software is complex because it models some very complex real-world situation. E.g. how complex can tax software be? Answer: as complex as the tax code, which is not just complex, but also contains tons of unspecified behavior. Yes, sometimes you can take a simple problem and write spaghetti code for it, but IME that is often not the real problem.
Re:Software Entropy by 1penny42cents on Wednesday June 24, 2020 @11:59PM (#23636772)
Right, there is the concept of essential complexity. This is addressed in the post:

> Sometimes, our problems are essentially complex. In these cases, our solutions need some essential complexity to match. But when does essential complexity become unnecessary?

We can measure this when the number of total states dominates the number of valid states. The number of invalid states is a measure of accidental complexity.

Re:Software Entropy by loopz on Thursday June 25, 2020 @03:42AM (#23637914)
There's also a concept of unnecessary complexity. Especially business processes are vulnerable to this, and may hint of policy or design issues.