Complexity fills the space it's given

Space and time ... "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law

Thanks, I enjoyed this and it rings true. This abstract concept of "space" getting filled up thoughtlessly, and that "space" being created by unnecessarily breaking things up into smaller parts that don't really need to be separate, makes a lot of sense and I think I've seen this happen.

The article stops short of proposing a clear plan for how to handle the opposite problem, though: Entrenched monoliths. Once a class (or other abstraction) has grown for long enough (e.g. perhaps someone has read this article and is trying to avoid unnecessary complexity of code structure), it can become very difficult to break it up.

>There is no such thing as a small legacy codebase

Very true. As a followup, I think it's worth pointing out that CLI applications in particular can cram a lot of functionality into very few LOC.

Last night, I read through the source code for `cat` (yes, that `cat`) and it was only about 800 lines of fairly breezy C: https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/cat.c

And a tiny CLI tool I use every day, several times a day, for learning Finnish, is about 200 lines of Python: https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/finstem

> Whether that’s a huge monolith or 124 tiny REST APIs makes very little difference.)

A huge spaghetti monolith is much better than a huge spaghetti collection of micro services.

At least complexity seems bounded, Bureaucracy, in contrast, expands to meet the growing needs of the Bureaucracy.

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40711661