Notes about A Philosophy of Software Design
My notes about the book by John Ousterhout. It is quite a short book. Originally I made a mistake of reading just the Conclusions of the chapters but there is a lot of contents not in the Conclusions. After really reading the whole book, I started to like the Red Flags and other small pieces of hints. Chapter 2 - The Nature of Complexity Complexity is anything related to the structure of a system that makes it hard to understand or modify. Isolating complexity in a place where it will almost never be seen or touched is almost as good as removing it. There are many symptoms of complexity: Change amplification - when change requires modification in many places. Cognitive load - how much a developer must know in order to make a change. Sometimes more code is simpler than less code because of cognitive load. Unknown unknowns - it is not obvious which places should be modified or what knowledge the developer must have to make a change. Complexity is caused by 2 things - dependencies and o