I'm loving these intelligent criticisms of the article.
My own biggest beef with the article is it entirely misses the deep point of Marie Kondo's work, which is about efficiency and joy. If the article is not actually a response to her philosophy and definition of tidiness, and just needed a cute title, well, that's confusing at the very least. The commenters who point out that codebases, for example, need to be reasonable for humans to work in, or that it sure is easier to change source code than a compiled binary, are on the right track.
Kondo's method is all about identifying the clutter _that is actually clutter_, and deleting it. Would you rather maintain a program that's 1000 lines, or 100? If the 1000-line program was written by you, for you, over the course of your life, and by your own admission is extremely messy and moderately unpleasant to deal with, containing lots of unused stuff, yet you run it, and modify it, every day, no one is going to force you to clean it up, but you can find joy in doing so.
Based on the content, it seems to be primarily a clever title. I don't think the author is trying to refute a hypothetical group of engineers who are trying to apply Marie Kondo's philosophy to software. (Not that there aren't devs who are doing that, but that doesn't seem to be the author's goal.)
This made me smile (“refute a hypothetical group of engineers...”). But even if the author is not refuting Kondo’s methods specifically, is the author not saying that acts of intentional tidying should be viewed with skepticism for putting form over function? When Kondo’s approach is a perfect counterexample of the claim that decluttering is putting aesthetics over efficiency.
Actually, I think this article is not about software at all, or decluttering a room, it’s about “ complex systems — like laws, cities, or corporate processes,” and then uses the word “systems” as shorthand for this, and then talks a bit about managing software projects but it’s really still about good corporate process, and then mentions tidying a room but mostly as a joke.
I think the actual point is more about large groups of people or organisms that function well together, and how you shouldn’t assume it is better to impose uniformity. Even then, though, it is easy to argue both sides of
this point, pick apart the examples given in the article, and use a codebase as an analogy to an organization.
My own biggest beef with the article is it entirely misses the deep point of Marie Kondo's work, which is about efficiency and joy. If the article is not actually a response to her philosophy and definition of tidiness, and just needed a cute title, well, that's confusing at the very least. The commenters who point out that codebases, for example, need to be reasonable for humans to work in, or that it sure is easier to change source code than a compiled binary, are on the right track.
Kondo's method is all about identifying the clutter _that is actually clutter_, and deleting it. Would you rather maintain a program that's 1000 lines, or 100? If the 1000-line program was written by you, for you, over the course of your life, and by your own admission is extremely messy and moderately unpleasant to deal with, containing lots of unused stuff, yet you run it, and modify it, every day, no one is going to force you to clean it up, but you can find joy in doing so.