The phrase has appeared in print at least as early as 1959, when it was used as a section heading in a NASA document. An earlier similar phrase appears in Mark Twain's Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses, where he lists rule fourteen of good writing as "eschew surplusage".

What is the etymology of the word obfuscate?

The verb shares its ob- root (meaning "over, completely") with obscure, another word that can refer to the act of concealing something or making it more difficult to see or understand. The rest of obfuscate comes from Latin fuscus, which means "dark brown" and is distantly related to our word dusk.

Why do people obfuscate code?

Obfuscation means to make something difficult to understand. Programming code is often obfuscated to protect intellectual property or trade secrets, and to prevent an attacker from reverse engineering a proprietary software program. ... Obfuscation aims to make reverse engineering difficult and not worth the trouble.