On Mon, 30 Nov 2020 14:10:02 +0100 "Martin McCormick"
<martin.m@suddenlink.net> wrote:
> If you aren't in to trying to modify some sort of
> embedded system to do something it wasn't originally designed to
> do then ram and storage are getting cheaper by the day and some
> things just aren't worth worrying about.
To a great extent that's true, although there is the danger
of falling into the attitude that abundance justifies waste.
(This can once again make things worth worrying about,
well before it might be necessary if you do things efficiently.)
However, there's another consideration: the KISS principle.
A system that needs 780 files is going to be a lot more complex
and difficult to understand than one that gets by with one or two.
This can have serious impacts on reliability and maintainability.
I'm seeing more and more cases of systems falling apart because
they're becoming too complex to administer. Some of this is because
they "just grew", without proper planning and pruning. Some of it
is due to that effect described by Blaise Pascal, who once apologized
for the length of the letter he was writing because he didn't have
time to make it shorter. And some, I'm sad to say, are a deliberate
effort at obfuscation: an old trick long used by politicians to keep
the electorate blissfully ignorant of their shenanigans, and now
adopted by some equally nefarious system designers.
--
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