Tux Machines

Complexity Is the Enemy

Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 28, 2024,

updated Feb 28, 2024

Typically said in relation to security [1, 2] rather than performance, program integrity etc.

18 months have now passed since we changed to "static", gradually moving away from Drupal after (at the time) about 18 years. A year later the sister site, Techrights, did the same, using the same code that had been tested here for a year.

At the moment this site uses a slightly more advanced and thus complex codebase than Techrights. This site has the notion of page type, "original" or "news", for instance.

In terms of performance, Techrights is a bit ahead (faster). It consistently looks something like this:

“The worst enemy of security is complexity. This has been true since the beginning of computers, and it’s likely to be true for the foreseeable future.” - Bruce Schneier

Techrights site speed

TM site speed

If we truly care about speed, then there's a risk that temptation to add more and more "features" (complexity) will slow things down. WordPress used to be very fast after it inherited "b2" (on which it was based). Nowadays the speed of WordPress is not satisfactory, either on the server side (too much PHP) or the client side (too much JavaScript) and the same is true for Drupal. We'll never go back to these. Never! █

“Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling — the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration. Possibly this trend results from a mistaken belief that using a somewhat mysterious device confers an aura of power on the user.”

--Niklaus Wirth, designer of the Pascal programming language (also see A Plea of Lean Software from Wirth)