First, few of the laws on that site are actual laws in the physics or mathematics sense. They are more guiding principles.
reply> complexity is not a function of time spent working on something.
But the complexity you observe is a function of your exposure to that complexity.
The notion of complexity exists to quantify the degree of struggle required to achieve some end. Ousterhout’s observation is that if you can move complexity into components far away from where you must do your work to achieve your ends, you no longer need to struggle with that complexity, and thus it effectively is not there anymore.
And in addition, the time you spend making a component work properly is absolutely a function of its complexity. Once you get it right, package it up neatly with a clean interface and a nice box, and leave it alone. Where "getting it right" means getting it to a state where you can "leave it alone".
replyI think the intent is that if you can cleanly encapsulate some complexity so that people working on stuff that uses it don't have to understand anything beyond a simple interface, that complexity "doesn't exist" for all intents and purposes. Obviously this isn't universal, but a fair percentage of programmers these days don't understand the hardware they're programming against due to the layers of abstractions over them, so it's not crazy either.
replyIt's showing that all the complexity in the components are someone else's problem. Your only complexity is your own top layer and your interface with the components.
replyOnly when the problem has been resolved well enough for your use cases. Like using an http client instead of dealing with parsing http messages or using a GUI toolkit instead of manipulating raw pixels.
replyThat’s pretty much what good design is about. Your solve a foundational problems and now no one else needs to think about it (including you when working on some other parts).