Hacker News Reader

> And also I would point out that there is a strong survivorship bias in Gall's law. All sustainable complex systems built up incrementally that are still around are by definition an example of success. But we don't actively see the resource cost of incrementalist dead-ends, or the limitations.

I don't see this as a problem. As expressed, Gall's Law describes necessary conditions for success, not sufficient conditions. Not all evolutions of simple systems will work, but according to the law not starting with a simple system will always result in failure.

There's still undoubtedly plenty to criticize, and I'm sure there's a law somewhere saying that all simple laws are wrong, but this law does express a coherent logical proposition.

> The von Neumann architecture

How do you get that? There was decades of prior experience both in computer science theory as well as practice, especially from the code breakers in WW2.

Decade of experience at best.

An example from 1945 and also from von Neumann is Mergesort, the first O(n logn) sorting algorithm, and still in use to this day. Von Neumann was known for inventing things from absolute scratch.

In no way did spaceships go from 0 to 1. Rocketry and flight, combustion, the list goes on and on.

The fascinating and sometimes exasperating thing about software development is that there are no absolutes. You can find exceptions to any “rule” you care to name.

That said, I’ve found that in the vast majority of cases you’re better off starting with a simple prototype and iteratively adding new features and refactoring than you are trying to build a complex system from scratch.

Von Neumann, seems to me, brilliant and his contributions vastly underappreciated.

But isn't any architecture, by definition, also the creation of a complex system from simple systems?