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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

I think there are two myths applicable here. Probably more.

One myth is that complex systems are inherently bad. Armed forces are incredibly complex. That's why it can take 10 or more rear echelon staff to support one fighting soldier. Supply chain logistics and materiel is complex. Middle ages wars stopped when gunpowder supplies ran out.

Another myth is that simple systems are always better and remain simple. They can be, yes. After all, DNA exists. But some beautiful things demand complexity built up from simple things. We still don't entirely understand how DNA and environment combine. Much is hidden in this simple system.

I do believe one programming language might be a rational simplification. If you exclude all the DSL which people implement to tune it.

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> Middle ages wars stopped when gunpowder supplies ran out.

The arquebus is the first mass gunpowder weapon, and doesn't see large scale use until around the 1480s at the very, very tail end of the Middle Ages (the exact end date people use varies based on topic and region, but 1500 is a good, round date for the end).

In Medieval armies, your limiting factor is generally that food is being provided by ransacking the local area for food and that a decent portion of your army is made up of farmers who need to be back home in the harvest season. A highly competent army might be able to procure food without acting as a plague on all the local farmlands, but most Medieval states lacked sufficient state capacity to manage that (in Europe, essentially only the Byzantines could do that).

Following the definition from the article, armed forces seems like a complicated system, not a complex one. There is a structured, repeatable solution for armed forces. It does not exhibit the hallmark characteristics of complex systems listed in the article like emergent behaviors.

not a fan of the article for this reason alone. good points made, but no reason to redefine perfectly good words when we already have words that work fine.

Agreed. The problem is not complexity. Every system must process a certain amount of information. And the systems complexity must be able to match that amount. The fundamental problem is about designing systems that can manage complexity, especially runaway complexity.

> Middle ages wars stopped when gunpowder supplies ran out

Ukraine would be conquered by russia rather quickly if russians weren't so hilariously incompetent in these complex tasks, and war logistics being the king of them. Remember that 64km queue of heavy machinery [1] just sitting still? This was 2022, and we talk about fuel and food, the basics of logistics support.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Kyiv_convoy

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