NonStop beats accidental complexity where others hit a wall
Roland LemoineThe topic of essential versus accidental complexity goes back to ancient Greece in a classification from Aristotle. But we can go just 30 years back instead of 3000 to find it well illustrated in software development, by Fred Brooks, a Turing award winner. In his 1987 essay “No Silver Bullet” he introduces two concepts, essential complexity and accidental complexity. Essential complexity is inherent to the problem the software needs to solve and cannot be removed.