This piece reflects some of the most frustrating professional interactions I’ve ever had where people insist that something is too complicated with no concrete suggestions for simplification.
1. It’s not actually overcomplicated, but the people saying it is haven’t thought about it hard enough to realize this.
2. It is overcomplicated, but it’s such a tangle of complexity that fixing it would require the people pointing out the problems to basically do it over from scratch.
#2 is usually the result of a very experienced developer being overwhelmed by the amount of complexity coming out is the vastly larger amount of inexperienced developers around them. It’s much easier to add complexity than it is to fight it.
There’s also a third reason: a form of anti-intellectualism where you think that designs that are hard to derive are intrinsically more complex than just doing the straightforwardly obvious thing.
What is intuitive is strongly dependent on what you have been taught. For example, if you have only been taught to use loops, then iterator functions like map and filter seem less intuitive. However, once you have learned them, iterator functions are dramatically more intuitive than loops.
