[mattmcknight]

This is where John Gall's Systemantics comes into play, “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system."

Obviously a bit hyperbolic, but matches my experience.

[thinkharderdev]

I agree with the saying as such but I think it's actually a counterpoint to the "do the simplest thing that could possibly work" idea. When building a system initially you want to do the simplest thing that can possible work, given some appropriate definition of "working". Ideally as the systems requirements evolve you should refactor to address the complexity by adding abstractions, making things horizontally scalable, etc. But for any given change the "simplest thing that can possible work" is usually something along the lines of "we'll just add another if-statement" or "we'll just add another parameter to the API call". Before you know it you have an incomprehensible API with 250 parameters which interact in complex ways and a rats nest of spaghetti code serving it.

I prefer the way Einstein said it (or at least I've heard it attributed to him, not sure if he actually said it): "Make things as simple as possible, but no simpler".

[codethief]

> But for any given change the "simplest thing that can possible work" is usually something along the lines of "we'll just add another if-statement" or "we'll just add another parameter to the API call".

Sounds to me like we need to distinguish between simplicity of the individual diff, and simplicity of the end result (i.e. the overall code base after applying the diff). The former is a very one-dimensional and local way of optimization, which over time can lead you far away from a global optimum.