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As far as how we use these words in software goes, I think "coupling" is just fine. To me it means exactly what we're talking about: making things depend on each other. "When you connect 2 Legos together you couple them" sounds off to me. I'd say that's just what you don't do. Rather, you compose them. Composition to me means putting together things that have no intrinsic dependency and are just as easy to separate again.

Reasonable people can obviously have different associations, but I thought "coupling" and "decoupling" were pretty standard terms in software. You know, "low coupling high cohesion" and all that.

What about when we simplify a design by removing dependencies between things? Surely we're not going to say we've "decomplected" them?

It goes without saying that we agree on the more important point, which is that whatever we call that thing we do to software where we make everything depend on everything, we fuck it up :)



> Surely we're not going to say we've "decomplected" them?

Simplified.


But that has the same problem you mentioned about "complicate". It just means "make simple", saying nothing more about how, nor about what it means to be simple. Not all simplification is disentangling.




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