Out of the Tar Pit

Complexity is the single major diculty in the successful development of large-scale software systems. Following Brooks we distinguish accidental from essential diculty, but disagree with his premise that most complexity remaining in contemporary systems is essential. We identify common causes of complexity and discuss general approaches which can be taken to eliminate them where they are accidental in nature. To make things more concrete we then give an outline for a potential complexity-minimizing approach based on functional programming and Codd’s relational model of data.

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