22 ms·

I look at programming as all design, whether deliberate or not. Martin Fowler drove the point home for me (https://www.martinfowler.com/articles/newMethodology.

I look at programming as all design, whether deliberate or not. Martin Fowler drove the point home for me (https://www.martinfowler.com/articles/newMethodology.html https://www.martinfowler.com/articles/newMethodology.html). He said that some people drew inspiration from construction, where there are designers and builders. One or two highly paid architects draw up the plans. Then you can hire a bunch of cheap labor to build it, say a bridge. This belief leads to a dichotomy in software companies, where one person is the "architect" and others are just "regular" programmers --- often outsourced to the lowest bidder. From Jack Reeves he cites the epiphany "that in fact the source code is a design document and that the construction phase is actually the use of the compiler and linker." There is little repetitive, mindless work in programming, because as most of you know, "anything that you can treat as construction can and should be automated." Therefore, "In software all the effort is design . . ."

krick 10y ago
I feel your sentiment, and usually oppose to the construction-driven approach you describe, but it is really easy to play devil's advocate here. I mean, let's just be realistic. There's nothing sacred in programming. The fault in your argument is that there's no design/construction dichotomy, but rather a gradient: everything can be viewed upon as a design from close enough distance, and everything can be a construction looking from the high above. For business people all the programming is just very, very low-level construction, and there's no design to it. Damn, even hiring programmers and creating companies is just a construction stage to them. And from the practical standpoint, the truth is that perceiving a lot of programming "just as a construction" just works. For the better or worse. It is cheaper and usually reliable enough to design the system in a way that a lot of the components would be plugins not depending one on the other that can be outsourced to anyone. Even if some fail, the system continues to work while you hire new people to rewrite some components. Sure, maybe it would be more efficient and "cool" to hire a really smart guy (or do it yourself, if you believe you can) to write it as really optimized monolith system, but if this isn't required, it is usually less risky to build something not so sophisticated, and improve it if need be. It is usually ok, that some parts of the system may fail. Fuck it, let's not lie to ourselves: there always are some parts of the system that fail, whether you think it's "acceptable" or not, let's just take it into account.
erikpukinskis 10y ago
> There is little repetitive, mindless work in programming, because as most of you know, "anything that you can treat as construction can and should be automated." Sure, but there is a cost to automation. We all know the programmers who will attempt to automate God if left to their own devices. cough At some point there is a tradeoff between automating something, and sending an email to an intelligent human being who maybe isn't god level at software architecture but who can fill out some organizational context with pidgen code. I think the idea that the only code that needs to get written is type of a decorator on a subtype Haskell kind of stuff is wrong. It's the same fallacy as people who say we just need physics and all of the natural sciences will shake out of it. We need Richard Stallmans and Terry Davis's to write that stuff for sure, and maybe they are the only True Programmers out there. But there's an awful lot of automation engineering that needs to get done too, and some of that really is just putHotDogIn(basket) (unless Debbie from accounting emails you to say no) and wget http://wordpress.com/dist.zip http://wordpress.com/dist.zip Let me say it another way: there are and will always be gnarled programmers who think in koans and concoct the words we code in, but spread across that will be a thick layer of humans embedded in human systems mapping the minutia of the day in code. I daresay we'll all be doing it. I suppose I agree that work is all design. But the code isn't the part that's being designed. The code is just the log format.

krick 10y ago

I feel your sentiment, and usually oppose to the construction-driven approach you describe, but it is really easy to play devil's advocate here. I mean, let's just be realistic. There's nothing sacred in programming. The fault in your argument is that there's no design/construction dichotomy, but rather a gradient: everything can be viewed upon as a design from close enough distance, and everything can be a construction looking from the high above. For business people all the programming is just very, very low-level construction, and there's no design to it. Damn, even hiring programmers and creating companies is just a construction stage to them. And from the practical standpoint, the truth is that perceiving a lot of programming "just as a construction" just works. For the better or worse. It is cheaper and usually reliable enough to design the system in a way that a lot of the components would be plugins not depending one on the other that can be outsourced to anyone. Even if some fail, the system continues to work while you hire new people to rewrite some components. Sure, maybe it would be more efficient and "cool" to hire a really smart guy (or do it yourself, if you believe you can) to write it as really optimized monolith system, but if this isn't required, it is usually less risky to build something not so sophisticated, and improve it if need be. It is usually ok, that some parts of the system may fail. Fuck it, let's not lie to ourselves: there always are some parts of the system that fail, whether you think it's "acceptable" or not, let's just take it into account.

erikpukinskis 10y ago

> There is little repetitive, mindless work in programming, because as most of you know, "anything that you can treat as construction can and should be automated." Sure, but there is a cost to automation. We all know the programmers who will attempt to automate God if left to their own devices. cough At some point there is a tradeoff between automating something, and sending an email to an intelligent human being who maybe isn't god level at software architecture but who can fill out some organizational context with pidgen code. I think the idea that the only code that needs to get written is type of a decorator on a subtype Haskell kind of stuff is wrong. It's the same fallacy as people who say we just need physics and all of the natural sciences will shake out of it. We need Richard Stallmans and Terry Davis's to write that stuff for sure, and maybe they are the only True Programmers out there. But there's an awful lot of automation engineering that needs to get done too, and some of that really is just putHotDogIn(basket) (unless Debbie from accounting emails you to say no) and wget http://wordpress.com/dist.zip http://wordpress.com/dist.zip Let me say it another way: there are and will always be gnarled programmers who think in koans and concoct the words we code in, but spread across that will be a thick layer of humans embedded in human systems mapping the minutia of the day in code. I daresay we'll all be doing it. I suppose I agree that work is all design. But the code isn't the part that's being designed. The code is just the log format.