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Episode 520: John Ousterhout on A Philosophy of Software Design

Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers

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Pulling Complexity Downwards

The idea is that we want to somehow find ways of hiding complexity. A classic example is just throwing tons of exceptions for every possible slightly strange condition, rather than figuring out how to handle those conditions so you don't have to throw exception andso. So if i can build a magil that solves really hard, gnarly problems, maybe it has to have some complexity internally, but it provides a really simple, clean inner face for everybody else in the system to use. That's reducing the overall complexity of the system. Only a small number of people will be affected by the complexity inside the madule.

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