Hacker News Reader

Yes, it's a common flaw among those who don't have any experience with this kind of business software to think that anything "purely technical" (like an operating system) must be more complex. I work on a piece of business software and the database layer, interprocess communications layer, etc all pale in comparison to the code dealing with such mundane items as orders and invoices.

View on HN

That's interesting! Do they pale in actual complexity of the code or in terms of sheer code size?

Both! I think the the complexity stems from the fact that an order (or an invoice) is a "human" and "fuzzy" artifact, while a relational database or TCP/IP stack is a mathematical-technical artifact and therefore much more amenable to the computer model. (I don't want to imply that a database isn't complex, but as Intuit shows: modeling accounting on a computer is also pretty damn complex.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com