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Comment by juancn | Hacker News Reader

One of the most surprisingly clear code bases is LLVM. It’s an old complex beast, yet it’s organized beautifully.

I mean, it has a lot of essential complexity but little accidental complexity.

That’s usually what I strive for when coding. Complexity is sometimes unavoidable, that’s fine, that’s why it’s essential. However, avoidable complexity should be… well… avoided.

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> a lot of essential complexity but little accidental complexity

Nice one. I'll copy that.

That's from "The mythical man-month". Old, and some parts are obsolete, but still worth a read as it does have a bunch of good insights.

I have not read it in a while but it would be interesting to debate what essays are no longer relevant. I'll be grabbing it off the shelf next to my original copy of the Byte issue on C mentioned yesterday and having a look for expired relevancy.

I haven't read it in a while either, but from memory the team organization of one "architect" and a bunch of implementers seems obsolete, for example.

Imho it's more relevant than ever, with the influx of cheap offshore remote developers

There are some sections about physical copies of documentation and managing the logistics of that when I read it.

Reminds me of a book I picked up about twenty years ago called "Testing Computer Software". I think it must have been written in the 80s, because instead of having a bug database, it talked about filling out a hardcopy form describing the issue and dropping it off at the programming department. I reckon you'd want to do it in duplicate on carbon paper, just so you can keep it in your own filing cabinet.

wouldn't wikis be good the contemporary successors of that section? it's about documentation being disconnected from code, about co-evolving and providing both in an economical way, in contrast to being inefficient or even ineffective in documenting technology.

You might be interested in reading the paper, No Silver Bullet, in which Fred Brooks coined these terms:

http://worrydream.com/refs/Brooks-NoSilverBullet.pdf

Didn't he copy them from Aristotle?

The idea of essence and accident comes from Aristotle, while essential and accidental complexity is new by Brooks.

This is what I came here to say. it and clang are both good source code.

Really? Go and read the assembly parser and get back to me.

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