Herbert Simon talked about the property of near-decomposability. The Unix Philosophy has DOTADIW. Smalltalk has message passing. C++ has bastardized object-orientation. In all cases, the system manages complexity by isolating the things that *can be* isolated.
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Systems designed with this pattern are robust. Like, incredibly so. Bugs often don't manifest and even when they do they aren't catastrophic because we build (or evolve) lots of very simple things easy-to-understand-and-interrogate components which communicate.
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For this reason, I get annoyed when people say "software is the most complex thing we build," at least when they want you to draw the conclusion, "programmers are masters of complexity." They're not. Good practices make it so you don't have to be!
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I wonder if this is just a feature of complex systems as a whole. The ability to encapsulate flaws and reroute pathways. I can make this case for biology and sociology also.
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That was Simon's argument, elucidated well in his The Sciences of The Artificial (one of my fav books).
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