4 ms·

> You possibly don't now much about civil engineering I don't, so maybe it's not the best example. But take houses for example, it's not common to see a dozen

by Aaargh20318 10y ago

> You possibly don't now much about civil engineering I don't, so maybe it's not the best example. But take houses for example, it's not common to see a dozen or more identical houses being built. After you've done 11, number 12 is not going to be much different.

jacquesm 10y ago
But the foundations might be slightly different to account for terrain differences. And that will not cause the civil engineers involved to re-define what a bulldozer or backhoe can or should do and how it should work, nor will it change the process they will use to make that foundation. In fact, the house sitting on top of the foundation will likely be the same project if they really are identical, just like copies of a piece of software, in other words, from an engineering perspective the job as far as the house is concerned was done with #1 if you want more than one house. It's all about the tools, processes, materials, soil knowledge and so on that are being employed in order to solve the problem, not about what is actually built. In the software equivalent there would be a new build process with associated terminology and tool obsoletion for almost every engineering project. Imagine workers coming to the job one morning to find that the tools they used the day before have now en-masse been declared obsolete and all their technology is slightly different, incompatible and un-tested. Then, a few weeks later at another job site it would be the same story all over. In the meantime, the engineers would be re-inventing engineering from first principles for every 5th job or so. In other professions that would be called madness.
- numlocked 10y ago
  I think that's the wrong perspective. Software is a tool. What you do with it is an outcome. A bulldozer is a tool. The house is the outcome. So, we already invented a bulldozer (some piece of software) and it's trivial to duplicate it and reuse it all over the world. But when we need a new type of machine it's harder because, well, it's new. In the software engineering world the goals is generally not to facsimile something like e.g. a house. It's to create a legitimately new tool. And since there are no real capital investments required (unlike building new tools in the physical world), and folks often value their free time at a weirdly low marginal rate, you end up with tool proliferation in a way not seen in the physical world, which makes it easy to think that we're building houses when in fact we're inventing the bulldozer.
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    > It's to create a legitimately new tool. More likely: to create a minor variation on an existing tool. There have been relatively few instances of legitimate new tool creation but many 100's (and probably 1000's) of instances of re-creating slight variations on the same tools. For instance: build tools, programming languages, libraries (95% duplicate functionality with some other library, and of course an inconsistent interface) and so on. > And since there are no real capital investments required (unlike building new tools in the physical world) Software requires enormous amounts of capital, in part due to all this re-invention. We even have a name for it: NIH, and we have a term for what happens to a software project that is a few years old (technical debt). Our tools and our processes are ill equipped to deal with the challenge and what is supposed to be building houses more often than not ends up with people re-inventing the bulldozer. Now there are times when that is the right thing to do, but most of the times it isn't.
    - Retric 10y ago
      Slashdot, Reddit, and HN are different tools. On the surface they seem similar, but so does a Philips head screwdriver and a Frearson, yet they really are different tools.
      - jacquesm 10y ago
        > Slashdot, Reddit, and HN are different tools. They're different end products, but they are not different tools. Conceivably they could have been built with the same toolchain, but instead they were all built with totally different tools (Perl, Lisp/Python, Arc) respectively.
        SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
        But how is this not complaining that some buildings are concrete and some are wood and some are gasp a hybrid? I mean, if those engineers were better at what they do, they'd use just one material, right? And they have hundred or thousands of kinds of screws! Why do they keep reinventing them? They're just meant to hold things together -- one job!
- jimbokun 10y ago
  "Imagine workers coming to the job one morning to find that the tools they used the day before have now en-masse been declared obsolete and all their technology is slightly different, incompatible and un-tested." This is one reason software is eating the world. It's actually possible to build new tools to increase productivity and start using them in a very short period of time. Sure, most of the tools are crap or marginal improvements at best. But with so many new ones being developed constantly, occasionally one offering real benefits shows up and every developer can benefit almost immediately. I also think you vastly overstate the amount of "NIH" and vastly understate the massive amount of actual reuse. How many developers use Apple's UIKit to build apps? Yes, a small number reject some out of the box components, but I'm sure many more developers just use what Apple provides as the building blocks of their application. Very few people write their own networking stack or HTTP library. And as much as newer programming languages get massive hype, the same languages tend to dominate the Tiobe rankings year after year (or whatever popularity metric you prefer). In other words, focusing on what gets posted to Hacker News probably doesn't reflect the experience of the median developer.

jacquesm 10y ago

But the foundations might be slightly different to account for terrain differences. And that will not cause the civil engineers involved to re-define what a bulldozer or backhoe can or should do and how it should work, nor will it change the process they will use to make that foundation. In fact, the house sitting on top of the foundation will likely be the same project if they really are identical, just like copies of a piece of software, in other words, from an engineering perspective the job as far as the house is concerned was done with #1 if you want more than one house. It's all about the tools, processes, materials, soil knowledge and so on that are being employed in order to solve the problem, not about what is actually built. In the software equivalent there would be a new build process with associated terminology and tool obsoletion for almost every engineering project. Imagine workers coming to the job one morning to find that the tools they used the day before have now en-masse been declared obsolete and all their technology is slightly different, incompatible and un-tested. Then, a few weeks later at another job site it would be the same story all over. In the meantime, the engineers would be re-inventing engineering from first principles for every 5th job or so. In other professions that would be called madness.

numlocked 10y ago
I think that's the wrong perspective. Software is a tool. What you do with it is an outcome. A bulldozer is a tool. The house is the outcome. So, we already invented a bulldozer (some piece of software) and it's trivial to duplicate it and reuse it all over the world. But when we need a new type of machine it's harder because, well, it's new. In the software engineering world the goals is generally not to facsimile something like e.g. a house. It's to create a legitimately new tool. And since there are no real capital investments required (unlike building new tools in the physical world), and folks often value their free time at a weirdly low marginal rate, you end up with tool proliferation in a way not seen in the physical world, which makes it easy to think that we're building houses when in fact we're inventing the bulldozer.
- jacquesm 10y ago
  > It's to create a legitimately new tool. More likely: to create a minor variation on an existing tool. There have been relatively few instances of legitimate new tool creation but many 100's (and probably 1000's) of instances of re-creating slight variations on the same tools. For instance: build tools, programming languages, libraries (95% duplicate functionality with some other library, and of course an inconsistent interface) and so on. > And since there are no real capital investments required (unlike building new tools in the physical world) Software requires enormous amounts of capital, in part due to all this re-invention. We even have a name for it: NIH, and we have a term for what happens to a software project that is a few years old (technical debt). Our tools and our processes are ill equipped to deal with the challenge and what is supposed to be building houses more often than not ends up with people re-inventing the bulldozer. Now there are times when that is the right thing to do, but most of the times it isn't.
  - Retric 10y ago
    Slashdot, Reddit, and HN are different tools. On the surface they seem similar, but so does a Philips head screwdriver and a Frearson, yet they really are different tools.
    - jacquesm 10y ago
      > Slashdot, Reddit, and HN are different tools. They're different end products, but they are not different tools. Conceivably they could have been built with the same toolchain, but instead they were all built with totally different tools (Perl, Lisp/Python, Arc) respectively.
      - SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
        But how is this not complaining that some buildings are concrete and some are wood and some are gasp a hybrid? I mean, if those engineers were better at what they do, they'd use just one material, right? And they have hundred or thousands of kinds of screws! Why do they keep reinventing them? They're just meant to hold things together -- one job!
jimbokun 10y ago
"Imagine workers coming to the job one morning to find that the tools they used the day before have now en-masse been declared obsolete and all their technology is slightly different, incompatible and un-tested." This is one reason software is eating the world. It's actually possible to build new tools to increase productivity and start using them in a very short period of time. Sure, most of the tools are crap or marginal improvements at best. But with so many new ones being developed constantly, occasionally one offering real benefits shows up and every developer can benefit almost immediately. I also think you vastly overstate the amount of "NIH" and vastly understate the massive amount of actual reuse. How many developers use Apple's UIKit to build apps? Yes, a small number reject some out of the box components, but I'm sure many more developers just use what Apple provides as the building blocks of their application. Very few people write their own networking stack or HTTP library. And as much as newer programming languages get massive hype, the same languages tend to dominate the Tiobe rankings year after year (or whatever popularity metric you prefer). In other words, focusing on what gets posted to Hacker News probably doesn't reflect the experience of the median developer.