On 10 October 2017 at 13:44, bartc <b...@freeuk.com> wrote: >> Can you not see how frustrating this is for people who >> have spent good chunks of their lives trying to do the best they can >> on these software systems? > > Only if they concede I might have a point. I haven't seen much sign of that!
You have a point, if you're willing to work in a simplified environment. Like most older, larger systems, a lot of the complexity comes from trying to support a large number of environments/configurations, many more than anyone could have envisioned at the start. Code gets layered on top of older code to support extra situations. Refactoring and simplification is possible, but often really hard because not all of the peculiar situations that prompted the complexity can be reproduced (or even remembered, much of the time) by the developers. Strict "no fix is allowed without a failing test demonstrating the bug" policies can help with that, but in practice such policies are *really* onerous, and tend to risk preventing necessary fixes being applied. The problem is that someone coming in saying "it could be so much simpler" is probably only considering a very small subset of the situations that have come up over the lifetime of the project. Summary: "Things don't need to be this complicated" is likely true. But the cost of simplifying is likely to either be massive coding effort, or reintroduction of obscure bugs that were previously fixed. So I've conceded that you might have a point. Are *you* willing to concede that you may have missed something when making your assertions? Paul -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
