Comment by smolder

There's certainly some difference in priorities between massive 1000-programmer projects where complexity must be aggressively managed and, say, a 3-person team making a simple web app. Different projects will have a different sweet spot in terms of structural complexity versus function complexity. I've seen code that, IMO, misses the sweet spot in either direction.

Sometimes there is too much code in mega-functions, poor separation of concerns and so on. These are easy mistakes to make, especially for beginners, so there are a lot of warnings against them.

Other times you have too many abstractions and too much indirection to serve any useful purpose. The ratio of named things, functional boundaries, and interface definitions to actual instructions can easily get out of hand when people dogmatically apply complexity-managing patterns to things that aren't very complex. Such over-abstraction can fall under YAGNI and waste time/$ as the code becomes slower to navigate, slower to understand in depth, and possibly slower to modify.

I think in software engineering we suffer more from the former problem than the latter problem, but the latter problem is often more frustrating because it's easier to argue for applying nifty patterns and levels of indirection than omitting them.

Just for a tangible example: If I have to iterate over a 3D data structure with an X Y and Z dimension, and use 3 nested loops to do so, is that too complex a function? I'd say no. It's at least as clear without introducing more functional boundaries, which is effort with no benefit.