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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.

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

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.