God, I wish I could get my product management team (and indirectly our customers) to understand this concept when they are constantly asking "can you just add a configuration parameter for that?"

I swear our software has more possible configuration combinations than there are known stars.

It's useful as well for describing tipping points in network effects, the power of tools or products that have multiple interlinked features and uses, conditions for non-linear growth, and moving from applicability to enough specific cases as to become a new form of a general case.

What's the point of linking Wikipedia articles here without any comment/question? What are we supposed to do with it?

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

— https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Find it interesting?

I like the Python-way, which allows to iterate over permutations and combinations without generating everything upfront.

https://docs.python.org/2/library/itertools.html

So lazy evaluation, really. This can help tame some instances of combinatorial explosions if you can filter the result enough before you concretize the result, but if you’re not careful you’ll end up in a long loop just like you would with an eager method.

Yes, use with care.

Now it’s the perfect time to pitch my npm package that helps you with combinatorial explosions: https://github.com/yuchi/combinatorial-explosion

It has few interesting utilities to explode an array of choices or a tree of choices.

Also the (very small) source code is heavily annotated: https://github.com/yuchi/combinatorial-explosion/blob/master...