Comment by dredmorbius

For a field that has a number of classic formulations of this essay (look up "The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer"), this is a new and excellent addition to the genre.

It's not just about programming. In writing up my own bit on this piece (http://redd.it/24cxgc), I happened to look for the origins of the phrase "complexity is the enemy", figuring it would turn up in some late 1980s / early 1990s Usenet post.

Nope.

The Economist Newspaper, Jan 18, 1958, volume 186: "It is easy to see that complexity is the enemy of reliability".

(Thanks again to the Google ngram viewer).

Bruce Schneier takes this one step further and notes that "Complexity is the enemy of security"

https://www.schneier.com/news-038.html

This also applies far beyond just programming, the Internet, or IT. All technology faces this problem, and it's going to bite us by and by.