Cruft-Free Quotient

Definition

Let the cruft-free quotient be

$$ \mathbb{C}_f = { 1 \over { F + P_i + P_c } } $$

where

$$ \begin{aligned} F & = \text{the number of third-party build-time dependencies} \\ P_i & = \text{the number of IDE plugins in use} \\ P_c & = \text{the number of CI plugins in use} \end{aligned} $$

The lower the value, the lower the quality of your code while noting that

$$ { \lim_{n \to 0} { 1 \over n } } = \infty $$

(as embodied, for example, by the IEEE 754 specification for floating-point arithmetic in digital computation and since the preceding is simply the inverse of

$$ { \lim_{n \to \infty} { 1 \over n } } = 0 $$

Axiom

The rationale behind the definition of the cruft-free quotient is simple: frameworks and plugins that “magically” alter code are only safe to use by highly experienced developers for whom they offer the least benefit and to whom they simply represent bloat and impediments to debugging by decoupling behavior from representation in the software’s source code. This includes wildly popular frameworks like Spring.