
Why Complexity is Different - iyeaton
https://mystudentvoices.com/why-complexity-is-different-ecd498e0eccb
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seiferteric
Wow that was a great article! Really helped me understand a lot of concepts I
was only vaguely familiar with before, thanks.

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milesrout
I admit I was a little surprised that I got to the end and hadn't seen any
'And the reason this is relevant to software is that for your software to be
understandable, grokkable, analysable, etc. you need to think about how the
details affect the whole' section.

Excellent article nonetheless.

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szemet
I come up with one for you:

The clear separation of microstates and macrostates in software, through
proper abstractions is a key to good software quality.

Unfortunately the lack of abstractions or the prevalence of leaky
abstractions, due to bad design and software management practices (e.g. monkey
patching) eventually leads many codebases into its critical point. In this
critical state small perturbations of microstates (either at development or at
runtime) causes unpredictable behavior changes at macroscale level.

So if you ever have wondered why our software quality is worse than the laws
of thermodynamics would justify:

Our best physicists are now working on theories based on renormalization
groups to exactly describe the expected distribution of blue screens of
deaths: To have much better models of how bad our applications are! ;)

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danek
This gives a great perspective on complexity. Reminds me a lot of the book An
Introduction to General Systems Thinking by Jerry Weinberg.
[https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-General-Systems-
Thinking...](https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-General-Systems-Thinking-
Anniversary/dp/0932633498)

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pella
more "Complex Systems" links ( Philosophy of Science )

[http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/view/subjects/chaos-
theory.h...](http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/view/subjects/chaos-theory.html)

