4 ms·

And all of the code for the NASA HR system, and budget management tools, and conference system, etc. The Facebook code base is not just the web pages you see a

by evgen 10y ago

And all of the code for the NASA HR system, and budget management tools, and conference system, etc. The Facebook code base is not just the web pages you see and backend to serve them, but encompasses just about everything used to run the company. It is also built and maintained by a much smaller group of coders for a much more ambiguous target domain. (And no, I do not think that the NASA domain is in any way more difficult than Facebook's.) I guess I have to question the relevancy of your counter-example.

muricula 10y ago
If programmers at NASA make a serious mistake on say the space stations's code, people will die and billions of dollars of equipment will be lost. The same cannot be said for a social website which serves a bunch of content. NASA has way more on the line than Facebook. Here's a great article on how NASA did development on the space shuttles code and the importance of process and quality: http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs162/sp13/hand-outs/They-Write-the-Right-Stuff.pdf http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs162/sp13/hand-outs/They-Wri...
- evgen 10y ago
  Well, if someone at Facebook screws up and inadvertently reveals certain names or locations or the existence of particular groups within some countries people get arrested, tortured, and die. Last I checked NASA screw ups only kill a couple of people at a time. So you are right, they are not even close to comparable. See how easy it is to make false equivalences? I am familiar with the referenced article and if anyone in the software industry outside of few specialized areas tried to push a process like that they would need to start the endeavor by polishing their resume because they would soon be looking for a new job.
  - jfoutz 10y ago
    For some reason I went the other direction with your phrase "start the endeavor". Had to reread to understand you didn't mean launch a shuttle. Not an attack or support for your position, just thought it was an amusing choice of words.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
coldtea 10y ago
>And no, I do not think that the NASA domain is in any way more difficult than Facebook's. You might not think it, but you'd be wrong. Facebook was for several first years just a set of PHP crud pages and heaps of servers to run them well. Since then they added their own compiler and such, but the core of what they do is serving web pages at scale. All known problems, solved by tens of teams all over the world, even at larger scales (Google for one). NASA's problem on the other hand is quite unique, any errors can cost lives, and their tasks frequently include totally novel solutions for totally novel problems related to space travel, guidance, simulations, materials science, and so on. Not the same difficulty at all.
- jerf 10y ago
  "Facebook was for several first years just a set of PHP crud pages and heaps of servers to run them well." Personally, I think we've all got a piece of the elephant here. It is true that there are no known methodologies that could build Facebook at the speed it has been built without producing a globally-incoherent design. Anything that could produce a globally-coherent design would have slowed them down so much that they wouldn't have been such big winners in the first place. (So "globally incoherent" isn't much of a criticism here, really.) On the other hand, there are options other than "a big set of PHP CRUD pages and heaps of servers" available to us now, too, and I expect those options to continue to advance in usability. Even the various projects that improve on PHP would bring more benefit if you could use them from day one instead of a retrofit.
  - chii 10y ago
    Facebook didn't win because of the software, but because of marketing. At its inception, it felt exclusive. You were special of you got an invite. The other social networks were open season. Facebook made some good design choices with the simple looking UI, and didn't offer the customisations MySpace had. But that's a design choice, not software engineering choice.
    - phil21 10y ago
      No one wins because of the software (code quality). They win on marketing and that software (UIx) doing a needed task people are willing to "pay" for. HN tends to be rather myopic in that programmers exist to program. Nope. Programmers exist to use a tool to solve a real world problem. The best way to do that is with the minimal amount of design and time required to accomplish the task at the desired level of reliability. Very few projects require anything resembling the "code quality" talked about on HN - in most cases I would say trying to enforce such principles generally result in worse outcomes and folks would have been better off spending 1/10th the money on a 16 year old off elance.com and simply fixed problems as they came up. Typically the thing that is done the quickest wins, even if the implementation would make you cry. The fact is from a business standpoint - it truly rarely matters. Very little is as critical as people think. I've noticed the industry becoming vastly disconnected with this fact recently.

by evgen 10y ago

muricula 10y ago

If programmers at NASA make a serious mistake on say the space stations's code, people will die and billions of dollars of equipment will be lost. The same cannot be said for a social website which serves a bunch of content. NASA has way more on the line than Facebook. Here's a great article on how NASA did development on the space shuttles code and the importance of process and quality: http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs162/sp13/hand-outs/They-Write-the-Right-Stuff.pdf http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs162/sp13/hand-outs/They-Wri...

evgen 10y ago
Well, if someone at Facebook screws up and inadvertently reveals certain names or locations or the existence of particular groups within some countries people get arrested, tortured, and die. Last I checked NASA screw ups only kill a couple of people at a time. So you are right, they are not even close to comparable. See how easy it is to make false equivalences? I am familiar with the referenced article and if anyone in the software industry outside of few specialized areas tried to push a process like that they would need to start the endeavor by polishing their resume because they would soon be looking for a new job.
- jfoutz 10y ago
  For some reason I went the other direction with your phrase "start the endeavor". Had to reread to understand you didn't mean launch a shuttle. Not an attack or support for your position, just thought it was an amusing choice of words.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

coldtea 10y ago

>And no, I do not think that the NASA domain is in any way more difficult than Facebook's. You might not think it, but you'd be wrong. Facebook was for several first years just a set of PHP crud pages and heaps of servers to run them well. Since then they added their own compiler and such, but the core of what they do is serving web pages at scale. All known problems, solved by tens of teams all over the world, even at larger scales (Google for one). NASA's problem on the other hand is quite unique, any errors can cost lives, and their tasks frequently include totally novel solutions for totally novel problems related to space travel, guidance, simulations, materials science, and so on. Not the same difficulty at all.

jerf 10y ago
"Facebook was for several first years just a set of PHP crud pages and heaps of servers to run them well." Personally, I think we've all got a piece of the elephant here. It is true that there are no known methodologies that could build Facebook at the speed it has been built without producing a globally-incoherent design. Anything that could produce a globally-coherent design would have slowed them down so much that they wouldn't have been such big winners in the first place. (So "globally incoherent" isn't much of a criticism here, really.) On the other hand, there are options other than "a big set of PHP CRUD pages and heaps of servers" available to us now, too, and I expect those options to continue to advance in usability. Even the various projects that improve on PHP would bring more benefit if you could use them from day one instead of a retrofit.
- chii 10y ago
  Facebook didn't win because of the software, but because of marketing. At its inception, it felt exclusive. You were special of you got an invite. The other social networks were open season. Facebook made some good design choices with the simple looking UI, and didn't offer the customisations MySpace had. But that's a design choice, not software engineering choice.
  - phil21 10y ago
    No one wins because of the software (code quality). They win on marketing and that software (UIx) doing a needed task people are willing to "pay" for. HN tends to be rather myopic in that programmers exist to program. Nope. Programmers exist to use a tool to solve a real world problem. The best way to do that is with the minimal amount of design and time required to accomplish the task at the desired level of reliability. Very few projects require anything resembling the "code quality" talked about on HN - in most cases I would say trying to enforce such principles generally result in worse outcomes and folks would have been better off spending 1/10th the money on a 16 year old off elance.com and simply fixed problems as they came up. Typically the thing that is done the quickest wins, even if the implementation would make you cry. The fact is from a business standpoint - it truly rarely matters. Very little is as critical as people think. I've noticed the industry becoming vastly disconnected with this fact recently.