What always surprises me about articles like this, and the discussions they produce, is how so many engineers and builders-of-things discard the evidence of their years of experience and see the world through the eyes of people who've never built a complex system.
For instance, a couple of years ago I inherited a convoluted, needlessly ornate and grotesque application that could clearly be rewritten and even extended in one-fifth the LOC it currently occupied. When I finally got greenlit to perform the surgery the usual thing happened, which is that I realized, after much painful effort, that the system had become grotesque little by little, in much the same way that good people turn bad: by taking steps that seem appropriate at the time to what the situation demands. My solution, in the end, was somewhat less grotesque than the original, and certainly more capable, and yet it was not the glittering jewel that I had imagined beforehand, and the path to it was littered with bodies. I assume many people on this site have had a similar experience.
So with regard to repugnant systems (giant commerical banks) and jobs (middle management) or jobs and systems that are repugnant due to the types and numbers of people who seem to be filling them (lawyers, politicians) and wrt established habits and customs and traditions -- to all of it I now perceive that these jobs and systems are the survivors of a mighty selection pressure, and the whole creaky affair so vastly outperformed the alternatives that it has taken over the world to the extent that now it seems as if nothing else is possible.
Something else is possible, of course; but the costs of these theoretically more benign and humane alternatives are impossible to envision. And I'm positive that the whole thing could not be redone, elegantly, in one-fifth the code.
And that is when stops being an anarchist: when one is mature enough to realise that there are reasons, if not excuses, for the present situation (no matter how odd it may be), and mature enough to realise that changing the present situation will necessarily involve its own compromises, pains and oddities.
For instance, a couple of years ago I inherited a convoluted, needlessly ornate and grotesque application that could clearly be rewritten and even extended in one-fifth the LOC it currently occupied. When I finally got greenlit to perform the surgery the usual thing happened, which is that I realized, after much painful effort, that the system had become grotesque little by little, in much the same way that good people turn bad: by taking steps that seem appropriate at the time to what the situation demands. My solution, in the end, was somewhat less grotesque than the original, and certainly more capable, and yet it was not the glittering jewel that I had imagined beforehand, and the path to it was littered with bodies. I assume many people on this site have had a similar experience.
So with regard to repugnant systems (giant commerical banks) and jobs (middle management) or jobs and systems that are repugnant due to the types and numbers of people who seem to be filling them (lawyers, politicians) and wrt established habits and customs and traditions -- to all of it I now perceive that these jobs and systems are the survivors of a mighty selection pressure, and the whole creaky affair so vastly outperformed the alternatives that it has taken over the world to the extent that now it seems as if nothing else is possible.
Something else is possible, of course; but the costs of these theoretically more benign and humane alternatives are impossible to envision. And I'm positive that the whole thing could not be redone, elegantly, in one-fifth the code.