"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.
