This is tough. I want to both passionately agree and disagree with the idea; I have real life experiences that could act as arguments for/against either side.

The easy thing to do would be to nitpick some small aspect of the article that doesn't have anything to do with the author's main point. (bad example case, maybe a misspelling, OMG how dare you judge the holy patterns book!, lol you totally ripped the patterns book, etc) Instead I want to try to express how I feel about this and how I think it's both correct and incorrect.

I'm a big proponent of keeping code small. Small code means there should be less that can go wrong. I get a headache if I run across a situation where I can't see a reasonably straight forward solution built of components I already have. I dislike making a whole new class if I don't have to, but on the other hand I prefer to have objects that are smart about their purpose rather than stupid/generic objects which have no specific knowledge of what they contain. It's a delicate balance. Do you make a class to represent a product identifier - or do you just use a string? There's often good arguments either way. How to choose?

When in doubt, simplicity should win - but that's a nebulous rule, too. (Ironic that simplicity isn't a simple thing, no?) What does it mean to be simple? The author touched on this in the final paragraph, but I think that deciding the meaning of simplicity is, in fact, the entire crux of the problem he was describing. If you're in a certain frame of mind, building a complex, interconnected framework may be the simplest solution. The same situation, when viewed differently, may appear to be solved with a handful of procedural functions in 1/10 the amount of code - but usually that point of view is with the benefit of hindsight. How do you know for sure that your simplicity isn't just a complex problem waiting to happen?

Let's say the product identifier was originally specified as a string, but as you develop you find that you often need the product name and image in addition to the identifier at a large number of points in your program. It was simpler to use a string at first, but now perhaps some kind of structure representing all of a product's information together would be nice. It might mean the difference between methods taking 3 arguments of product information vs. taking just one product object. Is that simpler or more complex? You've now introduced another class to your codebase. If you had added that on day one, anticipating this situation, you may have been labeled a "premature flexibilizationist." Why is it okay to add it now when you knew you'd need it from the start? How much old code will you be able to simplify now? How much time did you waste working around the old limitations?

To me, the truth of a design choice becomes clear the moment you start having to design around or in spite of it. The moment that happens - and I mean the VERY MOMENT you think, "hey, all I need is a very special-purpose method here that takes an extra argument and then..." you've got to stop everything and throw something away. Something has gone wrong somewhere.

If you ever write a line or two of logic that you've written somewhere else in the codebase, that very same reaction should immediately occur. Never. Repeat. Logic.

So yes, I'm in favor of simplicity - but no, I'm not in favor of blatantly ignoring the truth of your situation. Experience, logic, common sense, etc. exist for a reason. You can't just blindly write the simplest thing that will work when the simplest thing that works NOW will have to be deleted tomorrow to make room for the new simplest thing that you knew was going to come anyway. Should you plan for every. possible. contingency? No, of course not - just plan for what you need, but if you find later that you didn't need something - GET RID OF IT QUICK!

I think the problem with keeping things too simple at first is that somewhere someone has to deal with the complexity that's there but getting ignored. The problems are just pushed up higher and higher until eventually the user of the software is exposed to it. Taking that idea down into the APIs, when designing a class, your "user" might just be yourself later on in another context of the code, but why put yourself through a complex object interface when you could just make it clean here and now? I often see objects with convoluted usage patterns - you have to initialize this before that, if you call method X then method Y will not give correct results, etc. That kind of stuff is insane! Oh sure, it may have been simpler, easier, and quicker to implement the object at the time - and by golly if that wasn't what the agile extreme programming guru said to do - do the simplest thing that works, after all! The thing is, an interface like that is broken, IMO. It's crap. It's too complicated. Sometimes developers ignore that complexity is a larger scope problem than the text of the code itself, and that's an important thing to remember when deciding if something is needlessly complex or not.