In the announcement blog post for the 5.0 release of TypeScript, they used a phrase that caught my attention:

In 5.0, we’re cleaning up some of these problems, as well as reducing the concept count needed to understand the various kinds of enums you can declare.

Reducing concept count?! Is "concept count" an actual metric people measure?

The only real mention of this in the wild is a thoughtful blog post on "Minimum Concept Count" by Malcolm Holmes.

This is a great way to frame how hard or easy it is to learn your product. How many concepts do people need to understand to succeed at using your product? If it's a lot, it lowers the chances of adoption.

So a way to increase the chances of adoption is to remove the number of concepts needed to reach a result.

This could be as granular as removing multiple APIs that do the same thing (requiring less cognitive overhead and docs coverage) or simplifying the number of concepts taught during a Getting Started tutorial (decreasing Time to Hello World).

It's kinda like reducing the number of clicks to smooth out a UX – people will reach the destination faster in 2 clicks versus 5 clicks, which reduces the chances they'll bounce and leave the experience. It also has orthogonal benefits like reducing UI or backend code needed, increasing performance with a lower bundle size, possibly eliminating a tutorial, etc.

Have a lovely day,
Kamran