None of those views really express things that can be measured in a given piece of software. McCabe's "Cyclomatic complexity" was an attempt but it's widely thought to be not very good as a measure. I used to know a better one but even its name has faded away over the years. Views of complexity can even differ depending on whether one is viewing, e.g., the difficulty of maintenance vs the difficulty of testing.
Because of my background I am biased towards requirements and models of the software. In terms of requirements (and specifications), I find that when developing bug fixes or reviewing PRs, so often the requirements or specifications for the behavior in question aren't known and have to be reverse engineered. That can be hard, and can be done incorrectly. In terms of modeling, there is (or should be) a model that reflects the users' requirements, and another reflecting the actual software. The trick for design is how to go from the one to the other. Of course for software that is written largely by or for one person, no requirements or models may get written down. But never fear, they exist - at the least, they are in the mind of the person creating the system. That person may forget them or their definition may drift over time, and that can be a problem. We've seen it in the Leo codebase, for example. On Saturday, June 28, 2025 at 10:17:37 PM UTC-4 [email protected] wrote: > Remember the old saying, that you need to be twice as smart to debug code >> as to write it. >> > Oh, it is my first time to hear it. > > Btw, I've seen a post for a few days and I think you might be interested > in it. > - A meta-analysis of three different notions of software complexity: > https://typesanitizer.com/blog/complexity-definitions.html > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "leo-editor" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/leo-editor/81030cd6-edbb-4718-8e1b-d5bc80b8978cn%40googlegroups.com.
