Comment by kristjansson

There's an older talk Simon Peyton Jones (IIRC?) gave about some development or other in haskell, in which he suggested that many software systems have some aspect of the swamp or the marsh into which you must eventually wade - that there's a mucky, sticky, irreducible aspect to the problem that must be dealt with somewhere, regardless of how elegant the rest of the system is.

"that marsh thing" has stuck with me, and been a frequent contributor to my work and thinking. I'll happily take Law of Conservation of Ugly as a _much_ better name for the thought :)