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Lack of constraints.. I'm sure having no memory, no cycles or not even computer access time made people aim at diamonds, not tar pits.

One thing I'd add over the 'screwed industry', at least in the java,model era is that the more they added, the more "tools" they needed and it was seen as a quality. Basically quadratic complexity at the cultural level..

ps: as usual, https://duckduckgo.com/?q=stop+writing+classes+pycon&t=ffab&...



Is it just lack of constraints though? Minimalism also guarantees improved maintainability and fewer bugs in the code. The less you write, the fewer mistakes you make, it's that simple.


No, not really. Minimalism where I had seen it lead to spaghetti like hard to maintain and decipher the code. It was impossible to think about larger units, you had to juggle details of everything in head at the same time.


.. that sounds like the opposite of minimalism.


Exactly the opposite in my experience. The worst maintainable code is usually the minimal ”prototype” or ”MVP” solution. Couple it with time pressured continuous development and you get spaghetti.

Maintainable code has sane abstractions, it wraps external dependencies, and it has minimal interfaces between them and other code. Minimal here doesn’t mean quantitatively minimal but qualitatively minimal.


Spaghetti is not minimalism, it's quite the opposite. You should minimize dependencies, minimize every function, avoid repetitions, etc. What you mean by MVP that evolves into spaghetti is called "incompetence".


It's not the whole story, but budgets tend to get burned, regardless of whether we're talking about money, time, CPU cycles, RAM, disk storage and so on.




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