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Software Design with John Ousterhout

Legacy Code Rocks

CHAPTER

How to Reduce Complexity in Code

Anything that makes it hard for you to work in code is complexity. If you find it hard to read somebody's code, that's complexity. The overall goal, I think, is to reduce the complexity of the overall system. Each one of them may be individually simple. But if I think about the system, now I have thousands of functions that I have to understand how they all fit together and work together. And so at the system level, it may actually be quite complicated, even though the individual functions are very simple. So, I would say complexity applies at all these levels, but when trying to reduce it, you want to do it systemically.

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