12 ms·

Ask HN: CS papers for software architecture and design?

525 points by avrmav 9y ago

Can you please point me to some papers that you consider very influential for your work or that you believe they played significant role on how we structure our software nowdays?

harishneit 9y ago
For me, it would be: 1. actor model of computation (https://arxiv.org/abs/1008.1459 https://arxiv.org/abs/1008.1459) 2. map reduce (https://research.google.com/archive/mapreduce.html https://research.google.com/archive/mapreduce.html)
- macintux 9y ago
  On the industrial side, Jim Gray's paper complements Hewitt's nicely. http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/tandem/TR-85.7.pdf http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/tandem/TR-85.7.pdf (On second thought it helps to have Armstong's thesis on Erlang as a bridge between them, but I can't find an easily downloadable link at the moment.)
  - nickpsecurity 9y ago
    Joe Armstrong's thesis from Wayback Machine https://web.archive.org/web/20151104200534/https://www.sics.se/%7Ejoe/thesis/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20151104200534/https://www.sics....
  - EdwardCoffin 9y ago
    I also like the set of slides Paranoid Programming - Techniques for Constructing Robust Software [1] from Stratus Computer. They were discussed here earlier this year [2] [1] http://ftp.stratus.com/vos/doc/papers/RobustProgramming.ps http://ftp.stratus.com/vos/doc/papers/RobustProgramming.ps [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13678251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13678251
chatmasta 9y ago
Classic reference is Architecture of Open Source Applications [0] [0] http://aosabook.org/en/index.html http://aosabook.org/en/index.html
- Kagerjay 9y ago
  thats neat there's a full spreadsheet application on there too in this jsfiddle http://jsfiddle.net/audreyt/LtDyP/ http://jsfiddle.net/audreyt/LtDyP/. No external libraries used either, 99 lines
jph 9y ago
LISP. Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions Their Computation by Machine by John McCarthy at MIT. https://aiplaybook.a16z.com/reference-material/mccarthy-1960.pdf https://aiplaybook.a16z.com/reference-material/mccarthy-1960... "Introduction: A programming system called LISP (for LISt Processor) has been developed for the IBM 704 computer by the Artificial Intelligence group at M.I.T. The system was designed to facilitate experiments with a proposed system called the Advice Taker, whereby a machine could be instructed to handle declarative as well as imperative sentences and could exhibit "common sense" in carrying out its instructions."
zaptheimpaler 9y ago
DynamoDB paper [1] - one of the big AP, KV stores that kicked off the NoSQL wave. Paper about Akamai[2] - "Nuggets in content delivery" Also, acolyers blog "the morning paper". He reviews and explains one paper every day. its great because you get a sense of whats current. [1]http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/files/amazon-dynamo-sosp2007.pdf http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/files/amazon-dynamo-sosp... [2]https://www.akamai.com/cn/zh/multimedia/documents/technical-publication/algorithmic-nuggets-in-content-delivery-technical-publication.pdf https://www.akamai.com/cn/zh/multimedia/documents/technical-...
- godelmachine 9y ago
  The Morning Paper's Adrian Colyer is a human Machine. I religiously read his papers.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- elvinyung 9y ago
  nit: Dynamo != DynamoDB: http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2012/01/amazon-dynamodb.html http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2012/01/amazon-dynamodb....
eternalban 9y ago
> .. how we structure our software nowdays The current trends were mostly blog driven. (Notable exception being the design approach to distributed systems and databases, which has been noted by many in this thread. Brewer's CAP theorem, etc., of course, were hugely influential.) In terms of "CS" papers, there were a few that argued against the then prevailing canon such as object orientation. In terms of theory, the theoretical foundation of much of the current approach can be found (surprisingly) in papers from the 70s and 80s, e.g. Hoare's CSP (which influenced Go) is circa '85.
q3k 9y ago
Oldie but goodie: Large-scale cluster management at Google with Borg [1]. Kicked off the mainstream idea that maybe (dev)ops shouldn't care about servers and Linux service configuration or where exactly their code runs. [1] - https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/43438.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
sriram_malhar 9y ago
Hints for Computer System Design, Butler Lampson. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/acrobat-17.pdf https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/... End-to-End Arguments in System Design, http://web.mit.edu/Saltzer/www/publications/endtoend/endtoend.pdf http://web.mit.edu/Saltzer/www/publications/endtoend/endtoen... I think Rich Hickey (of Clojure) makes lovely points about application system design. I know you are looking for papers, but Rich's talks have influenced me greatly of late. https://github.com/tallesl/Rich-Hickey-fanclub https://github.com/tallesl/Rich-Hickey-fanclub
- EdwardCoffin 9y ago
  Lampson has done an update of his hints paper, in the form of a presentation [1] (the video of the talk), [2] (the slides). [1] http://www.heidelberg-laureate-forum.org/blog/video/lecture-friday-september-27-butler-w-lampson/ http://www.heidelberg-laureate-forum.org/blog/video/lecture-... [2] http://bwlampson.site/Slides/Hints%20and%20principles%20(HLF%202015).pdf http://bwlampson.site/Slides/Hints%20and%20principles%20(HLF... Edit: added link to slides
- godelmachine 9y ago
  I tried reading Hints for Computer System Design, Butler Lampson - but failed to make any sense of it. Couldn't place it in neither hardware or software. May I ask you to share your key takeaways from the paper? Sincerely,
davedx 9y ago
For me, the most influential was "Out of the Tar Pit". From the abstract: "Complexity is the single major difficulty in the successful development of large-scale software systems. Following Brooks we distinguish accidental from essential difficulty, but disagree with his premise that most complexity remaining in contemporary systems is essential." [1] https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love/blob/master/design/out-of-the-tar-pit.pdf https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love/blob/master...
- fermigier 9y ago
  I agree that's a wonderful paper to read, but has it had significant influence in the mainstream?
  - davedx 9y ago
    Maybe not in the mainstream, but I do see echos of the philosophy of reducing accidental complexity in clojure, elm, react/redux, rust.
  - anandabits 9y ago
    Not yet, but I suspect that is partly the mainstream not catching up to the ideas it contains yet.
    - chubot 9y ago
      See my sibling comment -- I honestly believe it's describing what people already do. I'm curious what someone who's read the paper (like I have) thinks.
  - chubot 9y ago
    I read this more than 5 years ago, I think from a recommendation on HN. But I must have gotten something different out of it than most people. It is advocating a particular architecture. But that architecture is essentially LAMP, as far as I can tell. It's what we ALREADY do!!! From the paper: FRP is currently a purely hypothetical approach to system architecture that has not in any way been proven in practice. It is however based firmly on principles from other areas (the relational model, functional and logic programming) which have been widely proven. In FRP all essential state takes the form of relations, and the essential logic is expressed using relational algebra extended with (pure) user- defined [18] functions. [18] By user-defined we mean specific to this particular FRP system (as opposed to pre- provided by an underlying infrastructure) ----- - All essential state takes the form of relations This is a database. (SQL deviates from the relational model, but I don't view that as important here. An SQL database stores everything as relations.) - Logic is expressed using pure user-defined functions This is PHP / CGI / FastCGI. PHP is imperative, but the entire program is a pure function, because the request state is cleared between every request. What am I missing? I'm being totally serious -- this is what I got out of it when I read it 5 years ago. You can quibble with the details of PHP or Rails not being pure functions, but I believe what's important is the architecture, not how the source code looks. The essential state is in the database, in the form of relation. Accidental state is thrown away. TL;DR -- PHP/MySQL is functional and relational.
tuukkah 9y ago
An open graph visualization system and its applications to software engineering: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.106.5621 http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.106....
DyslexicAtheist 9y ago
I compiled a list some time ago, I'm still actively updating it (if you have ideas for work that should be included please let me know): "An incomplete list of classic papers every Software Architect should read" https://blog.valbonne-consulting.com/2014/06/09/an-incomplete-list-of-classic-papers-every-software-architect-should-read/ https://blog.valbonne-consulting.com/2014/06/09/an-incomplet...
fabiopetrillo 9y ago
Philippe Kruchten's The 4+1 view model of architecture is a very influential work for software architecture/design: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/450b/1e34bc072589ed83f72f6f9b00af6d39b311.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/450b/1e34bc072589ed83f72f6f... .
qznc 9y ago
Conway's Law [0] is an essential aspect for large scale software development: > Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure. [0] http://www.melconway.com/Home/Conways_Law.html http://www.melconway.com/Home/Conways_Law.html
- godelmachine 9y ago
  Nice point. Will keep that in mind.
elvinyung 9y ago
I think one of the most useful papers about scaling modern web architectures is Armando Fox and Eric Brewer's Harvest, Yield, and Scalable Tolerant Systems: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/5015/8bc1a8a67295ab7bce0550886a9859000dc2.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/5015/8bc1a8a67295ab7bce0550... Not only was it the paper that first put into written word the CAP theorem, but it also prescribes design principles for scaling out applications with graceful degradation and "orthogonal decomposition" (i.e. service-oriented architectures). It's also a fairly short and easy read at only 4 pages, and I'd definitely recommend everyone interested in practical modern distributed systems to take a look.
fermigier 9y ago
"Scripting: Higher- Level Programming for the 21st Century" by J. Ousterhout was certainly very influencial (cf. Python, Ruby, etc.) https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/papers/scripting.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/papers/scripting.pd... Not sure the paper in itself aged so well. Also, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_important_publications_in_computer_science#Software_engineering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_important_publications...
- charlysl 9y ago
  Thx for the wikipedia link, this is probably the best paper list I've seen so far
charlysl 9y ago
[1] Joe Armstrong 2003. "Making reliable distributed systems in the presence of software errors" (the Erlang paper, perhaps the most famous implementation of message passing concurrency). [2] John Backus 1979. "Can programming be liberated from the von Neumann style? A functional style and its algebra of programs." (a famous case for functional programming) [3] Victor R. Basili and Albert J. Turner. 1975 "Iterative enhancement: A practical technique for software development" (Agile in 1975? Actually it seems iterative development can be traced back to the 50s) [4] Andrew D. Birrell and Bruce Jay Nelson 1984 "Implementing remote procedure calls" (The idea of making a distributed language operation similar to a local language operation) [5] Edsger W. Dijkstra. "Go To statement considered harmful" (the mother of all those "considered harmful" titles) [6] Carl Hewitt 1977. "Viewing control structures as patterns of passing messages". (seminal study of asynchronous messaging) [7] Carl Hewitt, Peter Bishop, and Richard Steiger 1973. "A universal modular ACTOR formalism for artificial intelligence" (idem) [8] Charles Antony Richard Hoare 1974. "Monitors: An operating system structuring concept". (an early refinement of a very influential concurrency concept) [9] Charles Antony Richard Hoare 1979. Communicating sequential processes (an early presentation of invariants for state machines) [10] deleted [11] Gilles Kahn and David B. MacQueen 1977. "Coroutines and networks of parallel processes" (non preemptive concurrency, an alternative to threads for collaborative concurrency) [12] Robert A. Kowalski 1979. "Algorithm = logic + control". (A logic program can be “read” in two ways: either as a set of logical axioms (the what) or as a set of commands (the how); the idea behind relational programming, like in prolog) [13] Nancy Leveson and Clark S. Turner 1993. "An investigation of the Therac-25 accidents." (the mother of all race conditions papers? Focuses the mind about the dangers of interleavings) [14] Henry Lieberman. 1986 "Using prototypical objects to implement shared behavior in object- oriented systems." (influenced js? Understanding delegation) [15] George A. Miller. 1956 "The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information." (this might be pushing it, but maybe the original case for managing complexity) [16] Chris Okasaki. 1998 "Purely Functional Data Structures." (how to design functional algorithms) [17] John C. Reynolds 1975. "User-defined types and procedural data structures as complementary approaches to data abstraction." (the fundamental abstract data types concept) [1] http://erlang.org/download/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf http://erlang.org/download/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf [2] https://www.thocp.net/biographies/papers/backus_turingaward_lecture.pdf https://www.thocp.net/biographies/papers/backus_turingaward_... [3] https://www.cs.umd.edu/~basili/publications/journals/J04.pdf https://www.cs.umd.edu/~basili/publications/journals/J04.pdf [4] http://www.bighole.nl/pub/mirror/www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/parc/techReports/CSL-83-7_Implementing_Remote_Procedure_Calls.pdf http://www.bighole.nl/pub/mirror/www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox... [5] https://homepages.cwi.nl/~storm/teaching/reader/Dijkstra68.pdf https://homepages.cwi.nl/~storm/teaching/reader/Dijkstra68.p... [6] https://www.cypherpunks.to/erights/history/actors/AIM-410.pdf https://www.cypherpunks.to/erights/history/actors/AIM-410.pd... [7] http://worrydream.com/refs/Hewitt-ActorModel.pdf http://worrydream.com/refs/Hewitt-ActorModel.pdf [8] http://www.cs.unm.edu/~cris/481/hoare-monitors.pdf http://www.cs.unm.edu/~cris/481/hoare-monitors.pdf [9] http://lass.cs.umass.edu/~shenoy/courses/677/readings/Hoare.pdf http://lass.cs.umass.edu/~shenoy/courses/677/readings/Hoare.... [11] https://hal.inria.fr/inria-00306565/PDF/rr_iria202.pdf https://hal.inria.fr/inria-00306565/PDF/rr_iria202.pdf [12] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.472.9550&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.472... [13] https://www.cs.umd.edu/class/spring2003/cmsc838p/Misc/therac.pdf https://www.cs.umd.edu/class/spring2003/cmsc838p/Misc/therac... [14] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.48.69 http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.48.6... [15] http://www.sns.ias.edu/~tlusty/courses/InfoInBio/Papers/Miller1956.pdf http://www.sns.ias.edu/~tlusty/courses/InfoInBio/Papers/Mill... [16] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/theses/okasaki.pdf https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/theses/okasaki.pdf [17] https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/71db/39fe3e2a6b80c52b18bd24b025428d4a7f44.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/71db/39fe3e2a6b80c52b18bd24...
mindvirus 9y ago
Here are some books, talks and papers that I've found really influential: Clean Architecture (https://www.amazon.com/dp/0134494164 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0134494164) - Uncle Bob has been talking about this for years, but it's a really good exploration of how to build systems. Turning the Database Inside Out is a talk that really made Apache Kafka and stream processing click with me. https://www.confluent.io/blog/turning-the-database-inside-out-with-apache-samza/ https://www.confluent.io/blog/turning-the-database-inside-ou... Going through and implementing the Raft algorithm was also very formative for me - it's the first time I really started to grok the challenges with building large scale distributed systems. https://raft.github.io/ https://raft.github.io/ And to add a paper to the list to not totally go off topic - Birrell's paper "An Introduction to Programming with Threads" I thought was a very useful read - in part for the historical context, but he also breaks down many fundamental concepts that will look very familiar to the modern reader (it was written nearly 30 years ago). It's also very readable. https://birrell.org/andrew/papers/035-Threads.pdf https://birrell.org/andrew/papers/035-Threads.pdf
mlvljr 9y ago
Any Parnas?
jesperlang 9y ago
A lot of good suggestions, but quite technical. Are there any good ones focusing on the design process, with a bias towards CS? I found this very intriguing: Towards a Theory of Conceptual Design for Software https://groups.csail.mit.edu/sdg/pubs/2015/concept-essay.pdf https://groups.csail.mit.edu/sdg/pubs/2015/concept-essay.pdf
markc 9y ago
Kreps and Kleppmann on stream processing, log abstraction, event sourcing: https://engineering.linkedin.com/distributed-systems/log-what-every-software-engineer-should-know-about-real-time-datas-unifying https://engineering.linkedin.com/distributed-systems/log-wha... https://martin.kleppmann.com/2015/03/04/turning-the-database-inside-out.html https://martin.kleppmann.com/2015/03/04/turning-the-database... https://www.confluent.io/blog/making-sense-of-stream-processing/ https://www.confluent.io/blog/making-sense-of-stream-process...
frantzmiccoli 9y ago
I would recommend Martin Fowler articles https://martinfowler.com/ https://martinfowler.com/
fabuzaid 9y ago
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the David Parnas papers: "On the Criteria To Be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules" is an all-time classic [1]. Much more philosophical than most of the suggestions here so far, but this paper really drove home to me the importance of abstraction in software design. (Also covered in the Morning Paper [2].) [1] https://www.cs.umd.edu/class/spring2003/cmsc838p/Design/criteria.pdf https://www.cs.umd.edu/class/spring2003/cmsc838p/Design/crit.... [2] https://blog.acolyer.org/2016/09/05/on-the-criteria-to-be-used-in-decomposing-systems-into-modules/ https://blog.acolyer.org/2016/09/05/on-the-criteria-to-be-us...
- jonjacky 9y ago
  Another excellent Parnas paper: "A Rational Design Process: How and Why to Fake It"
- jonjacky 9y ago
  An excellent textbook that teaches Parnas' approach is "Software Engineering: Planning for Change" by David Alex Lamb. The chapter Detailed Design is especially pertinent to this thread. The book is from 1988. I once wrote the author to ask if there would be another edition. He replied, "publishers aren't interested because it isn't object oriented". In fact, its lessons are as relevant to object-oriented programs as any others.
mtrn 9y ago
I liked reading: Program design in the UNIX environment by Rob Pike. Sometimes, when I think about which features to add to a program I step back to see, whether a combination of program would actually yield better results. A practical view into what orthogonality could mean in the tooling world. [1] https://nymity.ch/sybilhunting/pdf/Pike1983a.pdf https://nymity.ch/sybilhunting/pdf/Pike1983a.pdf
- igolden 9y ago
  Awesome recommendation
  - santix 9y ago
    Good one. At the bottom of page 3 it says that on UNIX V7 they added an unbuffered (-u) option to cat and then removed it on V8. Does anybody know why they removed it? I checked out the man for the GNU version and it says -u (ignored)
tonyspiro 9y ago
The folks at Heroku have the 12 Factor App https://12factor.net https://12factor.net
einarvollset 9y ago
In general, CS (the science) does not often concern itself with the kind of architecture decisions day-to-day programmers deal with. Instead, the field tends to offer architecture advice in particularly hairy areas (DB design, distributed FT consensus, etc). In my opinion, that’s how it should be - the goals of academics are very different to those shipping code in the real world. A great developer will be aware of when to turn to academia and when to turn to industry best practice - too often developers are not aware that they are wondering into a hairy area, and end up re-inventing flawed and inefficient versions that are well understood.
- drharby 9y ago
  That last line of yours is so very true. Whenever i find myself going down the rabbit hole i pick up the nearest relevant academic text and just speedread the relevant chapter to tailor my search doe relevant readymade solutions. Developer life is like googlefu xtreme edition
- capkutay 9y ago
  i was going to make a similar comment but this sums it up very well. CS papers work best when dealing with very specific, nitty gritty areas that require research after defining a hypothesis or problem to solve. 'Software architecture' is fairly broad and papers on those topics would read more like sociology papers than CS papers (e.g. how do people write code? here are some examples, here are some general patterns people like etc). Looking back on reading that sort of stuff, it was nice but I very rarely apply it in day to day software development compared to readings that are more niche to the problem I'm solving that week.
Maro 9y ago
I used to be very interested in Software Architecture, in fact I've read many of the papers cited here. When I did a startup many years ago, I committed the mistake of paying too much attention to the architecture of the software [1] I was writing, and not enough attention to the product/customer side of it. The last couple of years I've been de-emphasizing software architecture as an interest, and have been paying much more attention to how product teams build successful products, what the patterns are, etc. I was lucky enough to work at Facebook for a while and got to see (and learn) a very successful working model of product development. So, while I'm not saying that software architecture is not important (it is), also pay attention to the product/customer side: what choices (software, organizational, hiring, business) allow you to move fast and iterate, to release early and often, to run A/B tests, etc. I think good software engineers are just as much product guys (and data guys) as they are software guys. - [1] https://github.com/scalien/scaliendb https://github.com/scalien/scaliendb
- Clubber 9y ago
  Agreed, good architecture doesn't come into play until you need to add a lot of complex features or scale significantly. Initially architecture doesn't really mean squat. I would concentrate on making the codebase flexible, but that's about it. I've regretted making some of my software with a cool but complex architecture when I should have been focused on what the product does.
  - humanrebar 9y ago
    > I would concentrate on making the codebase flexible, but that's about it Arguably that's the property of good architecture. Standardizing your entire codebase also works, but only as long as those initial standards stay smart (1), and even then, that relies on discipline, tools, and incentives that are typically not all in place. (1) A standard might be "all webservers will be written in Java 6". The benefits of choosing that standard tend to be front-loaded with a gradual decline into net-negative with no affordable path to a better standard.
    - qznc 9y ago
osullivj 9y ago
Brad Cox: Planning the Software Industrial Revolution. A classic from the creator of Objective-C. Incredibly far sighted in 1990, and still very relevant today. [1] http://bat8.inria.fr/~lang/hotlist/free/licence/papers/cox/CoxPSIR.html http://bat8.inria.fr/~lang/hotlist/free/licence/papers/cox/C...
JeroenRansijn 9y ago
Write code that is easy to participate in.
lachenmayer 9y ago
Not sure it says a lot about 'architecture', but in terms of 'design', Daniel Jackson's "Rethinking Software Design" has been an absolute eye-opener: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNe6g0qczxE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNe6g0qczxE The premise of the talk is that while software engineering goals & processes are well-defined and well-understood, the same does not apply for software design. He sets up a framework of 'purposes' and 'concepts', which in an ideal design should be a 1:1 mapping. He points out many examples of 'design smells', where this 1:1 mapping is violated, for whatever reason (engineering reasons, product management failures, etc.) Definitely useful not just to developers, but anyone involved in writing software/affected by the process of writing software.
- charlysl 9y ago
  I am a big fan of Daniel Jackson's approach to teaching programming, and really like his courses, in particular the mindblowing "Elements of Software Construction" [1], which is, by a mile, the best programming course I have come across, and which I believe is sadly underrated; I know there are more recent versions of this course, by a different professor, that use the more popular (at least in this forum) Python instead of Java, but IMHO with all due respect, they are a bit dumbed down and I believe that you won't get the same out of them. It is not really a Java course, it has improved my programming (and, very specially, design) in general, in any language. It completely changed the way I look at design patterns, for instance; it made me really understand functional programming and state machines; what OO really is about; how to choose a software paradigm for a given problem; and now I use JSP stream processing to model many programs (nothing to do with java JSP, it was created by his dad in the 70s, "the other Michael Jackson"). To really appreciate how much thought went into the design of this course, I recommend reading "A New Approach to Teaching Programming" [2] As for the Concepts and Purposes you refer to, there is more on this in [3] [4] [5] in the MIT 6.170 [1] https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-005-elements-of-software-construction-fall-2008/ https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-compu... [2] http://people.csail.mit.edu/dnj/articles/teaching-6005.pdf http://people.csail.mit.edu/dnj/articles/teaching-6005.pdf [3] https://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/6/fa16/6.170/courseMaterial/topics/topic2/lectureNotes/L12_-_concept-slides/L12_-_concept-slides.pdf https://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/6/fa16/6.170/courseMaterial... [4] https://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/6/fa16/6.170/courseMaterial/topics/topic2/lectureNotes/L14_-_concepts-part-2/L14_-_concepts-part-2.pdf https://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/6/fa16/6.170/courseMaterial... [5] https://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/6/fa16/6.170/courseMaterial/topics/topic3/resource/Recitation_8_-_Concepts/Recitation_8_-_Concepts.pdf https://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/6/fa16/6.170/courseMaterial...
inopinatus 9y ago
Not a paper, but Martin Fowler's book "Refactoring" changed the way I structure my domain models forever.
cpeterso 9y ago
Eric Evans' "Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software" book is long and pretty dry, but it's immediately practical and opened my mind to how object-oriented design is supposed to work. https://amzn.com/0321125215 https://amzn.com/0321125215 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain-driven_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain-driven_design
- darethas 9y ago
  Is there a world of software architecture that exists outside the "OOP" patterns we have seen in the last 2 decades? A quarter of the way through my career and I have already grown weary of OOP. It's promises are never realized. It is full of zealots who can argue with you for ages but don't deliver very much on real world, performant software.
westurner 9y ago
"The Architecture of Open Source Applications" Volumes I & II http://aosabook.org/en/ http://aosabook.org/en/ "Manifesto for Agile Software Development" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development#The_Agile_Manifesto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development#The... "Catalog of Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture" https://martinfowler.com/eaaCatalog/ https://martinfowler.com/eaaCatalog/ Fowler > Publications ("Refactoring ",) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Fowler#Publications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Fowler#Publications "Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software" (GoF book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_Patterns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_Patterns . UNIX Philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy Plan 9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs ## Distributed Systems CORBA > Problems and Criticism (monolithic standards, oversimplification,): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Object_Request_Broker_Architecture#Problems_and_criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Object_Request_Broker_A... Bulk Synchronous Parallel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulk_synchronous_parallel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulk_synchronous_parallel Paxos: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos_(computer_science) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos_(computer_science) Raft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raft_(computer_science) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raft_(computer_science) #Safety CAP theorem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAP_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAP_theorem
justonepost 9y ago
Decouple and cohesion. Beyond that it's pretty domain dependent.
yogeshp 9y ago
Here are some links (papers & talks) on scalable software architecture https://github.com/Developer-Y/Scalable-Software-Architecture https://github.com/Developer-Y/Scalable-Software-Architectur...
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

525 points by avrmav 9y ago

Can you please point me to some papers that you consider very influential for your work or that you believe they played significant role on how we structure our software nowdays?

harishneit 9y ago

For me, it would be: 1. actor model of computation (https://arxiv.org/abs/1008.1459 https://arxiv.org/abs/1008.1459) 2. map reduce (https://research.google.com/archive/mapreduce.html https://research.google.com/archive/mapreduce.html)

macintux 9y ago
On the industrial side, Jim Gray's paper complements Hewitt's nicely. http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/tandem/TR-85.7.pdf http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/tandem/TR-85.7.pdf (On second thought it helps to have Armstong's thesis on Erlang as a bridge between them, but I can't find an easily downloadable link at the moment.)
- nickpsecurity 9y ago
  Joe Armstrong's thesis from Wayback Machine https://web.archive.org/web/20151104200534/https://www.sics.se/%7Ejoe/thesis/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20151104200534/https://www.sics....
- EdwardCoffin 9y ago
  I also like the set of slides Paranoid Programming - Techniques for Constructing Robust Software [1] from Stratus Computer. They were discussed here earlier this year [2] [1] http://ftp.stratus.com/vos/doc/papers/RobustProgramming.ps http://ftp.stratus.com/vos/doc/papers/RobustProgramming.ps [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13678251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13678251

chatmasta 9y ago

Classic reference is Architecture of Open Source Applications [0] [0] http://aosabook.org/en/index.html http://aosabook.org/en/index.html

Kagerjay 9y ago
thats neat there's a full spreadsheet application on there too in this jsfiddle http://jsfiddle.net/audreyt/LtDyP/ http://jsfiddle.net/audreyt/LtDyP/. No external libraries used either, 99 lines

jph 9y ago

LISP. Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions Their Computation by Machine by John McCarthy at MIT. https://aiplaybook.a16z.com/reference-material/mccarthy-1960.pdf https://aiplaybook.a16z.com/reference-material/mccarthy-1960... "Introduction: A programming system called LISP (for LISt Processor) has been developed for the IBM 704 computer by the Artificial Intelligence group at M.I.T. The system was designed to facilitate experiments with a proposed system called the Advice Taker, whereby a machine could be instructed to handle declarative as well as imperative sentences and could exhibit "common sense" in carrying out its instructions."

zaptheimpaler 9y ago

DynamoDB paper [1] - one of the big AP, KV stores that kicked off the NoSQL wave. Paper about Akamai[2] - "Nuggets in content delivery" Also, acolyers blog "the morning paper". He reviews and explains one paper every day. its great because you get a sense of whats current. [1]http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/files/amazon-dynamo-sosp2007.pdf http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/files/amazon-dynamo-sosp... [2]https://www.akamai.com/cn/zh/multimedia/documents/technical-publication/algorithmic-nuggets-in-content-delivery-technical-publication.pdf https://www.akamai.com/cn/zh/multimedia/documents/technical-...

godelmachine 9y ago
The Morning Paper's Adrian Colyer is a human Machine. I religiously read his papers.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
elvinyung 9y ago
nit: Dynamo != DynamoDB: http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2012/01/amazon-dynamodb.html http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2012/01/amazon-dynamodb....

eternalban 9y ago

> .. how we structure our software nowdays The current trends were mostly blog driven. (Notable exception being the design approach to distributed systems and databases, which has been noted by many in this thread. Brewer's CAP theorem, etc., of course, were hugely influential.) In terms of "CS" papers, there were a few that argued against the then prevailing canon such as object orientation. In terms of theory, the theoretical foundation of much of the current approach can be found (surprisingly) in papers from the 70s and 80s, e.g. Hoare's CSP (which influenced Go) is circa '85.

q3k 9y ago

Oldie but goodie: Large-scale cluster management at Google with Borg [1]. Kicked off the mainstream idea that maybe (dev)ops shouldn't care about servers and Linux service configuration or where exactly their code runs. [1] - https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/43438.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

sriram_malhar 9y ago

Hints for Computer System Design, Butler Lampson. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/acrobat-17.pdf https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/... End-to-End Arguments in System Design, http://web.mit.edu/Saltzer/www/publications/endtoend/endtoend.pdf http://web.mit.edu/Saltzer/www/publications/endtoend/endtoen... I think Rich Hickey (of Clojure) makes lovely points about application system design. I know you are looking for papers, but Rich's talks have influenced me greatly of late. https://github.com/tallesl/Rich-Hickey-fanclub https://github.com/tallesl/Rich-Hickey-fanclub

EdwardCoffin 9y ago
Lampson has done an update of his hints paper, in the form of a presentation [1] (the video of the talk), [2] (the slides). [1] http://www.heidelberg-laureate-forum.org/blog/video/lecture-friday-september-27-butler-w-lampson/ http://www.heidelberg-laureate-forum.org/blog/video/lecture-... [2] http://bwlampson.site/Slides/Hints%20and%20principles%20(HLF%202015).pdf http://bwlampson.site/Slides/Hints%20and%20principles%20(HLF... Edit: added link to slides
godelmachine 9y ago
I tried reading Hints for Computer System Design, Butler Lampson - but failed to make any sense of it. Couldn't place it in neither hardware or software. May I ask you to share your key takeaways from the paper? Sincerely,

davedx 9y ago

For me, the most influential was "Out of the Tar Pit". From the abstract: "Complexity is the single major difficulty in the successful development of large-scale software systems. Following Brooks we distinguish accidental from essential difficulty, but disagree with his premise that most complexity remaining in contemporary systems is essential." [1] https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love/blob/master/design/out-of-the-tar-pit.pdf https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love/blob/master...

fermigier 9y ago
I agree that's a wonderful paper to read, but has it had significant influence in the mainstream?
- davedx 9y ago
  Maybe not in the mainstream, but I do see echos of the philosophy of reducing accidental complexity in clojure, elm, react/redux, rust.
- anandabits 9y ago
  Not yet, but I suspect that is partly the mainstream not catching up to the ideas it contains yet.
  - chubot 9y ago
    See my sibling comment -- I honestly believe it's describing what people already do. I'm curious what someone who's read the paper (like I have) thinks.
- chubot 9y ago
  I read this more than 5 years ago, I think from a recommendation on HN. But I must have gotten something different out of it than most people. It is advocating a particular architecture. But that architecture is essentially LAMP, as far as I can tell. It's what we ALREADY do!!! From the paper: FRP is currently a purely hypothetical approach to system architecture that has not in any way been proven in practice. It is however based firmly on principles from other areas (the relational model, functional and logic programming) which have been widely proven. In FRP all essential state takes the form of relations, and the essential logic is expressed using relational algebra extended with (pure) user- defined [18] functions. [18] By user-defined we mean specific to this particular FRP system (as opposed to pre- provided by an underlying infrastructure) ----- - All essential state takes the form of relations This is a database. (SQL deviates from the relational model, but I don't view that as important here. An SQL database stores everything as relations.) - Logic is expressed using pure user-defined functions This is PHP / CGI / FastCGI. PHP is imperative, but the entire program is a pure function, because the request state is cleared between every request. What am I missing? I'm being totally serious -- this is what I got out of it when I read it 5 years ago. You can quibble with the details of PHP or Rails not being pure functions, but I believe what's important is the architecture, not how the source code looks. The essential state is in the database, in the form of relation. Accidental state is thrown away. TL;DR -- PHP/MySQL is functional and relational.

tuukkah 9y ago

An open graph visualization system and its applications to software engineering: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.106.5621 http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.106....

DyslexicAtheist 9y ago

I compiled a list some time ago, I'm still actively updating it (if you have ideas for work that should be included please let me know): "An incomplete list of classic papers every Software Architect should read" https://blog.valbonne-consulting.com/2014/06/09/an-incomplete-list-of-classic-papers-every-software-architect-should-read/ https://blog.valbonne-consulting.com/2014/06/09/an-incomplet...

fabiopetrillo 9y ago

Philippe Kruchten's The 4+1 view model of architecture is a very influential work for software architecture/design: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/450b/1e34bc072589ed83f72f6f9b00af6d39b311.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/450b/1e34bc072589ed83f72f6f... .

qznc 9y ago

Conway's Law [0] is an essential aspect for large scale software development: > Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure. [0] http://www.melconway.com/Home/Conways_Law.html http://www.melconway.com/Home/Conways_Law.html

godelmachine 9y ago
Nice point. Will keep that in mind.

elvinyung 9y ago

I think one of the most useful papers about scaling modern web architectures is Armando Fox and Eric Brewer's Harvest, Yield, and Scalable Tolerant Systems: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/5015/8bc1a8a67295ab7bce0550886a9859000dc2.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/5015/8bc1a8a67295ab7bce0550... Not only was it the paper that first put into written word the CAP theorem, but it also prescribes design principles for scaling out applications with graceful degradation and "orthogonal decomposition" (i.e. service-oriented architectures). It's also a fairly short and easy read at only 4 pages, and I'd definitely recommend everyone interested in practical modern distributed systems to take a look.

fermigier 9y ago

"Scripting: Higher- Level Programming for the 21st Century" by J. Ousterhout was certainly very influencial (cf. Python, Ruby, etc.) https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/papers/scripting.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/papers/scripting.pd... Not sure the paper in itself aged so well. Also, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_important_publications_in_computer_science#Software_engineering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_important_publications...

charlysl 9y ago
Thx for the wikipedia link, this is probably the best paper list I've seen so far

charlysl 9y ago

[1] Joe Armstrong 2003. "Making reliable distributed systems in the presence of software errors" (the Erlang paper, perhaps the most famous implementation of message passing concurrency). [2] John Backus 1979. "Can programming be liberated from the von Neumann style? A functional style and its algebra of programs." (a famous case for functional programming) [3] Victor R. Basili and Albert J. Turner. 1975 "Iterative enhancement: A practical technique for software development" (Agile in 1975? Actually it seems iterative development can be traced back to the 50s) [4] Andrew D. Birrell and Bruce Jay Nelson 1984 "Implementing remote procedure calls" (The idea of making a distributed language operation similar to a local language operation) [5] Edsger W. Dijkstra. "Go To statement considered harmful" (the mother of all those "considered harmful" titles) [6] Carl Hewitt 1977. "Viewing control structures as patterns of passing messages". (seminal study of asynchronous messaging) [7] Carl Hewitt, Peter Bishop, and Richard Steiger 1973. "A universal modular ACTOR formalism for artificial intelligence" (idem) [8] Charles Antony Richard Hoare 1974. "Monitors: An operating system structuring concept". (an early refinement of a very influential concurrency concept) [9] Charles Antony Richard Hoare 1979. Communicating sequential processes (an early presentation of invariants for state machines) [10] deleted [11] Gilles Kahn and David B. MacQueen 1977. "Coroutines and networks of parallel processes" (non preemptive concurrency, an alternative to threads for collaborative concurrency) [12] Robert A. Kowalski 1979. "Algorithm = logic + control". (A logic program can be “read” in two ways: either as a set of logical axioms (the what) or as a set of commands (the how); the idea behind relational programming, like in prolog) [13] Nancy Leveson and Clark S. Turner 1993. "An investigation of the Therac-25 accidents." (the mother of all race conditions papers? Focuses the mind about the dangers of interleavings) [14] Henry Lieberman. 1986 "Using prototypical objects to implement shared behavior in object- oriented systems." (influenced js? Understanding delegation) [15] George A. Miller. 1956 "The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information." (this might be pushing it, but maybe the original case for managing complexity) [16] Chris Okasaki. 1998 "Purely Functional Data Structures." (how to design functional algorithms) [17] John C. Reynolds 1975. "User-defined types and procedural data structures as complementary approaches to data abstraction." (the fundamental abstract data types concept) [1] http://erlang.org/download/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf http://erlang.org/download/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf [2] https://www.thocp.net/biographies/papers/backus_turingaward_lecture.pdf https://www.thocp.net/biographies/papers/backus_turingaward_... [3] https://www.cs.umd.edu/~basili/publications/journals/J04.pdf https://www.cs.umd.edu/~basili/publications/journals/J04.pdf [4] http://www.bighole.nl/pub/mirror/www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/parc/techReports/CSL-83-7_Implementing_Remote_Procedure_Calls.pdf http://www.bighole.nl/pub/mirror/www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox... [5] https://homepages.cwi.nl/~storm/teaching/reader/Dijkstra68.pdf https://homepages.cwi.nl/~storm/teaching/reader/Dijkstra68.p... [6] https://www.cypherpunks.to/erights/history/actors/AIM-410.pdf https://www.cypherpunks.to/erights/history/actors/AIM-410.pd... [7] http://worrydream.com/refs/Hewitt-ActorModel.pdf http://worrydream.com/refs/Hewitt-ActorModel.pdf [8] http://www.cs.unm.edu/~cris/481/hoare-monitors.pdf http://www.cs.unm.edu/~cris/481/hoare-monitors.pdf [9] http://lass.cs.umass.edu/~shenoy/courses/677/readings/Hoare.pdf http://lass.cs.umass.edu/~shenoy/courses/677/readings/Hoare.... [11] https://hal.inria.fr/inria-00306565/PDF/rr_iria202.pdf https://hal.inria.fr/inria-00306565/PDF/rr_iria202.pdf [12] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.472.9550&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.472... [13] https://www.cs.umd.edu/class/spring2003/cmsc838p/Misc/therac.pdf https://www.cs.umd.edu/class/spring2003/cmsc838p/Misc/therac... [14] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.48.69 http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.48.6... [15] http://www.sns.ias.edu/~tlusty/courses/InfoInBio/Papers/Miller1956.pdf http://www.sns.ias.edu/~tlusty/courses/InfoInBio/Papers/Mill... [16] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/theses/okasaki.pdf https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/theses/okasaki.pdf [17] https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/71db/39fe3e2a6b80c52b18bd24b025428d4a7f44.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/71db/39fe3e2a6b80c52b18bd24...

mindvirus 9y ago

Here are some books, talks and papers that I've found really influential: Clean Architecture (https://www.amazon.com/dp/0134494164 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0134494164) - Uncle Bob has been talking about this for years, but it's a really good exploration of how to build systems. Turning the Database Inside Out is a talk that really made Apache Kafka and stream processing click with me. https://www.confluent.io/blog/turning-the-database-inside-out-with-apache-samza/ https://www.confluent.io/blog/turning-the-database-inside-ou... Going through and implementing the Raft algorithm was also very formative for me - it's the first time I really started to grok the challenges with building large scale distributed systems. https://raft.github.io/ https://raft.github.io/ And to add a paper to the list to not totally go off topic - Birrell's paper "An Introduction to Programming with Threads" I thought was a very useful read - in part for the historical context, but he also breaks down many fundamental concepts that will look very familiar to the modern reader (it was written nearly 30 years ago). It's also very readable. https://birrell.org/andrew/papers/035-Threads.pdf https://birrell.org/andrew/papers/035-Threads.pdf

mlvljr 9y ago

Any Parnas?

jesperlang 9y ago

A lot of good suggestions, but quite technical. Are there any good ones focusing on the design process, with a bias towards CS? I found this very intriguing: Towards a Theory of Conceptual Design for Software https://groups.csail.mit.edu/sdg/pubs/2015/concept-essay.pdf https://groups.csail.mit.edu/sdg/pubs/2015/concept-essay.pdf

markc 9y ago

Kreps and Kleppmann on stream processing, log abstraction, event sourcing: https://engineering.linkedin.com/distributed-systems/log-what-every-software-engineer-should-know-about-real-time-datas-unifying https://engineering.linkedin.com/distributed-systems/log-wha... https://martin.kleppmann.com/2015/03/04/turning-the-database-inside-out.html https://martin.kleppmann.com/2015/03/04/turning-the-database... https://www.confluent.io/blog/making-sense-of-stream-processing/ https://www.confluent.io/blog/making-sense-of-stream-process...

frantzmiccoli 9y ago

I would recommend Martin Fowler articles https://martinfowler.com/ https://martinfowler.com/

fabuzaid 9y ago

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the David Parnas papers: "On the Criteria To Be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules" is an all-time classic [1]. Much more philosophical than most of the suggestions here so far, but this paper really drove home to me the importance of abstraction in software design. (Also covered in the Morning Paper [2].) [1] https://www.cs.umd.edu/class/spring2003/cmsc838p/Design/criteria.pdf https://www.cs.umd.edu/class/spring2003/cmsc838p/Design/crit.... [2] https://blog.acolyer.org/2016/09/05/on-the-criteria-to-be-used-in-decomposing-systems-into-modules/ https://blog.acolyer.org/2016/09/05/on-the-criteria-to-be-us...

jonjacky 9y ago
Another excellent Parnas paper: "A Rational Design Process: How and Why to Fake It"
jonjacky 9y ago
An excellent textbook that teaches Parnas' approach is "Software Engineering: Planning for Change" by David Alex Lamb. The chapter Detailed Design is especially pertinent to this thread. The book is from 1988. I once wrote the author to ask if there would be another edition. He replied, "publishers aren't interested because it isn't object oriented". In fact, its lessons are as relevant to object-oriented programs as any others.

mtrn 9y ago

I liked reading: Program design in the UNIX environment by Rob Pike. Sometimes, when I think about which features to add to a program I step back to see, whether a combination of program would actually yield better results. A practical view into what orthogonality could mean in the tooling world. [1] https://nymity.ch/sybilhunting/pdf/Pike1983a.pdf https://nymity.ch/sybilhunting/pdf/Pike1983a.pdf

igolden 9y ago
Awesome recommendation
- santix 9y ago
  Good one. At the bottom of page 3 it says that on UNIX V7 they added an unbuffered (-u) option to cat and then removed it on V8. Does anybody know why they removed it? I checked out the man for the GNU version and it says -u (ignored)

tonyspiro 9y ago

The folks at Heroku have the 12 Factor App https://12factor.net https://12factor.net

einarvollset 9y ago

In general, CS (the science) does not often concern itself with the kind of architecture decisions day-to-day programmers deal with. Instead, the field tends to offer architecture advice in particularly hairy areas (DB design, distributed FT consensus, etc). In my opinion, that’s how it should be - the goals of academics are very different to those shipping code in the real world. A great developer will be aware of when to turn to academia and when to turn to industry best practice - too often developers are not aware that they are wondering into a hairy area, and end up re-inventing flawed and inefficient versions that are well understood.

drharby 9y ago
That last line of yours is so very true. Whenever i find myself going down the rabbit hole i pick up the nearest relevant academic text and just speedread the relevant chapter to tailor my search doe relevant readymade solutions. Developer life is like googlefu xtreme edition
capkutay 9y ago
i was going to make a similar comment but this sums it up very well. CS papers work best when dealing with very specific, nitty gritty areas that require research after defining a hypothesis or problem to solve. 'Software architecture' is fairly broad and papers on those topics would read more like sociology papers than CS papers (e.g. how do people write code? here are some examples, here are some general patterns people like etc). Looking back on reading that sort of stuff, it was nice but I very rarely apply it in day to day software development compared to readings that are more niche to the problem I'm solving that week.

Maro 9y ago

I used to be very interested in Software Architecture, in fact I've read many of the papers cited here. When I did a startup many years ago, I committed the mistake of paying too much attention to the architecture of the software [1] I was writing, and not enough attention to the product/customer side of it. The last couple of years I've been de-emphasizing software architecture as an interest, and have been paying much more attention to how product teams build successful products, what the patterns are, etc. I was lucky enough to work at Facebook for a while and got to see (and learn) a very successful working model of product development. So, while I'm not saying that software architecture is not important (it is), also pay attention to the product/customer side: what choices (software, organizational, hiring, business) allow you to move fast and iterate, to release early and often, to run A/B tests, etc. I think good software engineers are just as much product guys (and data guys) as they are software guys. - [1] https://github.com/scalien/scaliendb https://github.com/scalien/scaliendb

Clubber 9y ago
Agreed, good architecture doesn't come into play until you need to add a lot of complex features or scale significantly. Initially architecture doesn't really mean squat. I would concentrate on making the codebase flexible, but that's about it. I've regretted making some of my software with a cool but complex architecture when I should have been focused on what the product does.
- humanrebar 9y ago
  > I would concentrate on making the codebase flexible, but that's about it Arguably that's the property of good architecture. Standardizing your entire codebase also works, but only as long as those initial standards stay smart (1), and even then, that relies on discipline, tools, and incentives that are typically not all in place. (1) A standard might be "all webservers will be written in Java 6". The benefits of choosing that standard tend to be front-loaded with a gradual decline into net-negative with no affordable path to a better standard.
  - qznc 9y ago

osullivj 9y ago

Brad Cox: Planning the Software Industrial Revolution. A classic from the creator of Objective-C. Incredibly far sighted in 1990, and still very relevant today. [1] http://bat8.inria.fr/~lang/hotlist/free/licence/papers/cox/CoxPSIR.html http://bat8.inria.fr/~lang/hotlist/free/licence/papers/cox/C...

JeroenRansijn 9y ago

Write code that is easy to participate in.

lachenmayer 9y ago

Not sure it says a lot about 'architecture', but in terms of 'design', Daniel Jackson's "Rethinking Software Design" has been an absolute eye-opener: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNe6g0qczxE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNe6g0qczxE The premise of the talk is that while software engineering goals & processes are well-defined and well-understood, the same does not apply for software design. He sets up a framework of 'purposes' and 'concepts', which in an ideal design should be a 1:1 mapping. He points out many examples of 'design smells', where this 1:1 mapping is violated, for whatever reason (engineering reasons, product management failures, etc.) Definitely useful not just to developers, but anyone involved in writing software/affected by the process of writing software.

charlysl 9y ago
I am a big fan of Daniel Jackson's approach to teaching programming, and really like his courses, in particular the mindblowing "Elements of Software Construction" [1], which is, by a mile, the best programming course I have come across, and which I believe is sadly underrated; I know there are more recent versions of this course, by a different professor, that use the more popular (at least in this forum) Python instead of Java, but IMHO with all due respect, they are a bit dumbed down and I believe that you won't get the same out of them. It is not really a Java course, it has improved my programming (and, very specially, design) in general, in any language. It completely changed the way I look at design patterns, for instance; it made me really understand functional programming and state machines; what OO really is about; how to choose a software paradigm for a given problem; and now I use JSP stream processing to model many programs (nothing to do with java JSP, it was created by his dad in the 70s, "the other Michael Jackson"). To really appreciate how much thought went into the design of this course, I recommend reading "A New Approach to Teaching Programming" [2] As for the Concepts and Purposes you refer to, there is more on this in [3] [4] [5] in the MIT 6.170 [1] https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-005-elements-of-software-construction-fall-2008/ https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-compu... [2] http://people.csail.mit.edu/dnj/articles/teaching-6005.pdf http://people.csail.mit.edu/dnj/articles/teaching-6005.pdf [3] https://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/6/fa16/6.170/courseMaterial/topics/topic2/lectureNotes/L12_-_concept-slides/L12_-_concept-slides.pdf https://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/6/fa16/6.170/courseMaterial... [4] https://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/6/fa16/6.170/courseMaterial/topics/topic2/lectureNotes/L14_-_concepts-part-2/L14_-_concepts-part-2.pdf https://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/6/fa16/6.170/courseMaterial... [5] https://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/6/fa16/6.170/courseMaterial/topics/topic3/resource/Recitation_8_-_Concepts/Recitation_8_-_Concepts.pdf https://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/6/fa16/6.170/courseMaterial...

inopinatus 9y ago

Not a paper, but Martin Fowler's book "Refactoring" changed the way I structure my domain models forever.

cpeterso 9y ago

Eric Evans' "Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software" book is long and pretty dry, but it's immediately practical and opened my mind to how object-oriented design is supposed to work. https://amzn.com/0321125215 https://amzn.com/0321125215 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain-driven_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain-driven_design

darethas 9y ago
Is there a world of software architecture that exists outside the "OOP" patterns we have seen in the last 2 decades? A quarter of the way through my career and I have already grown weary of OOP. It's promises are never realized. It is full of zealots who can argue with you for ages but don't deliver very much on real world, performant software.

westurner 9y ago

"The Architecture of Open Source Applications" Volumes I & II http://aosabook.org/en/ http://aosabook.org/en/ "Manifesto for Agile Software Development" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development#The_Agile_Manifesto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development#The... "Catalog of Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture" https://martinfowler.com/eaaCatalog/ https://martinfowler.com/eaaCatalog/ Fowler > Publications ("Refactoring ",) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Fowler#Publications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Fowler#Publications "Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software" (GoF book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_Patterns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_Patterns . UNIX Philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy Plan 9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs ## Distributed Systems CORBA > Problems and Criticism (monolithic standards, oversimplification,): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Object_Request_Broker_Architecture#Problems_and_criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Object_Request_Broker_A... Bulk Synchronous Parallel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulk_synchronous_parallel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulk_synchronous_parallel Paxos: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos_(computer_science) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos_(computer_science) Raft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raft_(computer_science) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raft_(computer_science) #Safety CAP theorem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAP_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAP_theorem

justonepost 9y ago

Decouple and cohesion. Beyond that it's pretty domain dependent.

yogeshp 9y ago

Here are some links (papers & talks) on scalable software architecture https://github.com/Developer-Y/Scalable-Software-Architecture https://github.com/Developer-Y/Scalable-Software-Architectur...

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]