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I disagree a little bit, but agree with you in part. You're drawing a distinction between codebase tersity and business processes. See my other reply here abou
by arcfide 10y ago
I disagree a little bit, but agree with you in part. You're drawing a distinction between codebase tersity and business processes.
See my other reply here about Direct Development. One of the better ways to do APL development is to write your codebase in such a way that you don't just onboard other developers, you onboard the customers as well. You don't just talk about business processes and then have some IT team turn that into code, the customers themselves work off the code together with the developers directly on solving the issues of business process. The result is that the code literally reflects the needs and expressions of "why" because that's the document or artifact in which the customers write their business processes down. And at that point, tersity matters. It's important that semantic density of the code keeps computer science-y stuff away from the customer, and brings the domain vocabulary of the customer to the fore in the code itself. You can't do this if you have your code littered with words and vocabulary that the customer has to parse and work with. The words that the customer sees, i.e., the variable names, should, ideally, only come from their own domain. In this way they can follow the code and see how the data flows.
That's the way to make business processes the core component of everything. You're reducing the development cycle down to a singular point, or very close to that.
There are a number of papers on this, but this idea of "user pair programming" has been successfully used in a number of APL projects, and is often the basic interaction/development methodology through the community.
And I would argue that the most important thing about the code base is that it accurately expresses the solution to the needs of the user, that it is capable of shifting with the needs of the user as quickly as the needs of the user change, and, finally, that it be as easy as possible to verify with the user that the code in fact is an accurate solution to their needs.
You could say I care more about whether the users can get what they need out of the code, including verifying that the code is what they intend, than about how easy it is to onboard other developers who are separate from the customer. That's best achieved by making the code easier for the user to read, rather than easier for the broad range of developers to read.