Essential complexity refers to a situation where all reasonable solutions to a problem must be complicated (and possibly confusing) because the "simple" solutions would not adequately solve the problem. It stands in contrast to accidental complexity, which arises purely from mismatches in the particular choice of tools and methods applied in the solution.
This term has been used since, at least, the mid-1980s. Turing Award winner Fred Brooks has used this term and its antonym of accidental complexity since the mid-1980s. He has also updated his views in 1995 for an anniversary edition of Mythical Man-Month, chapter 17 "'No Silver Bullet' Refired".
Read more about Essential Complexity: Cyclomatic Complexity
Famous quotes containing the words essential and/or complexity:
“Perfect present has no existence in our consciousness. As I said years ago in Erewhon, it lives but upon the sufferance of past and future. We are like men standing on a narrow footbridge over a railway. We can watch the future hurrying like an express train towards us, and then hurrying into the past, but in the narrow strip of present we cannot see it. Strange that that which is the most essential to our consciousness should be exactly that of which we are least definitely conscious.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)
“The price we pay for the complexity of life is too high. When you think of all the effort you have to put in—telephonic, technological and relational—to alter even the slightest bit of behaviour in this strange world we call social life, you are left pining for the straightforwardness of primitive peoples and their physical work.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)