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Comment by dheera | Hacker News Reader

Excuse me if I'm ignorant; I get that it's a complicated watch but how are complications a countable concept? They list "57 complications". If I just added a 6 gears to the mechanism that do nothing, does that make it 63 complications? If I change the circle to a complicated shape with 25 vertices, is that counted as one complication or 25 complications upon the simplicity of the circle? If I tell time in binary, how do you count the added complexity?

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a complication is each thing the watch does, so a date would be a complication, a moon phase, etc

Why don't they just call it a feature?

Complication is just a watchmaking term for what others might call features

A pretty accurate one in software also.

Tedu (OpenBSD) considers features to be (unnecessary) complications

The use of domain-specific language signals membership in the domain. Such as "pushing to origin" instead of "uploading to the remote Git instance".

Watchmaking likely predates the usage of 'feature' as a general term for the same concept.

Because the mechanism and it's purpose; namely, keeping track of time, is further complicated when doing something else.

It occurs to me that 'complication' is a better engineering term. Next to 'complication', 'feature' seems like an unfortunate euphemism.

I think so too. Given a mechanical context, a complication is very significant. People should think in those terms as there are no freebies.

Overly complicated mechanisms tend to be less robust, perform more poorly,require more energy, and more.

> Excuse me if I'm ignorant

Why? You have Google at your fingertips.

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