I like most of the points he makes but that "complect" business is fingers-on-a-chalkboard pretentious to my ears. "Coupling" and "complexity" are perfectly good words and have been used for decades to talk about this stuff.
But the stuff about how simplicity and easiness are not the same (at least in the short run) is very good.
I like the appropriation of an archaic word for this use. The point is to make you think about something familiar in a manner that is unfamiliar to most.
The word is now strongly connected to the concepts of easy and simple which Rich tries to untangle. From now on, when you hear someone tell you that you have "complected" something, it will most likely cause you to remember the talk and sort of forces you to think.
Just hearing talk about "coupling" might not trigger such a reaction.
"Coupling" and "complexity" are nouns, "complect" is a verb. Complect is to complex as complicate is to complicated - It means "complexify" for those who prefer archaisms to neologisms.
"Couple" is of course a verb. There are other words people have long used for this too. There's no need for obscure new jargon, and it's ironic that a talk about simplicity would introduce any. It gives the wrong impression, because these concepts are neither new nor difficult. What's difficult is building systems that respect them.
"Coupling" has always been a particularly weak word for the software problems to which it's been applied, IMO. After all, when you connect 2 Legos together you couple them.
"Complicate" was a candidate, but is decidedly unsatisfying. It just means "make complex", saying nothing more about how; nor about what it means to be complex. For many people, simply adding more stuff is to "complicate", and that was another presumption I wanted to get away from. There is also some intention in "complicate", as in, "to mess with something", vs the insidious complexity that arises from our software knitting.
I wanted to get at the notion of folding/braiding directly, but saying "you braided the software, dammit!" doesn't quite work :)
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 :)
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.
I thought it was pretty clear - he used "complect" because it shared an etymological root with "complex". The whole talk is about drawing distinctions between superficially related concepts, and using specific definitions based on words' etymological histories to do it.
The word "complicated" is generally synonymous with the word "complex", but that doesn't matter - the word "simple" is generally synonymous with the word "easy", after all. If Rich Hickey had said "complicate" viewers may well have asked whether he meant "to make complex" or "to make complicated", and perhaps wonder whether he was trying to draw a distinction between those concepts as well.
But the stuff about how simplicity and easiness are not the same (at least in the short run) is very good.