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From the article: “Reification just becomes legacy without a sufficient lack of architecture.”. This is so eloquently put. Technical Debt is a mess in of itse

by vxxzy 9y ago

From the article: “Reification just becomes legacy without a sufficient lack of architecture.”. This is so eloquently put. Technical Debt is a mess in of itself. But there still exists the chasm Of meeting business needs immediately (time to market) and avoiding technical debt. The sign of a good developer is attempting to look ahead and wonder how else will data need to be presented and manipulated - building the system open-ended enough to allow for the evolution of business needs.

lmm 9y ago
> The sign of a good developer is attempting to look ahead and wonder how else will data need to be presented and manipulated - building the system open-ended enough to allow for the evolution of business needs. I've gradually become convinced of just the opposite: a good developer doesn't think ahead at all. The best way to prepare for the evolution of business needs isn't to add extension hooks in the middle of your code, it's to keep the code as simple as possible so that you can change it in a very direct way as and when you need to.
- hderms 9y ago
  I agree in the sense that your system will be the most flexible provided you use composeable and easy to understand code as much as possible. Overengineering is overengineering because it trades complexity for "flexibility" but the real goal is to keep complexity down as much as possible.
- arethuza 9y ago
  I've convinced that 95% if the "extension points" I've seen built into code over the years never get used to create extensions - usually because they have significant assumptions about what extensions would be required that turn out to be very wrong.
  - hinkley 9y ago
    There are subtle ways to add extension points that most people won’t even notice. For instance, putting related code into a data structure allows you to add more to it later without replumbing the whole system (as opposed to functions with five arguments). With enough experience with refactoring, just choosing a structure that’s easy to refactor can serve as an extension point. (I have even tricked people into implementing a feature the way I had it in my head by writing the intermediate version in such a way to suggest a simple change for part 2.)
  - mickronome 9y ago
    Never add any extension points you don't already need, but design as if you could suddenly be tasked with adding all kinds of weird ones, but mostly without spending any significant time. Try to make sure that reasonable extensions are cheap to add, and that even some of the more unreasonable ones are at least possible without complete system redesign. This should not significantly impact either implementation time, or design time. But it will almost certainly make you avoid some really bad design choices that make quite plausible changes extremely expensive. Good design is more about avoiding obvious traps than finding a path to nirvana.
- kbenson 9y ago
  It's not always about a hook, sometimes it's about where yo break into subsystems and subfunctions. Breaking it up at the right point allows for easy extension through writing new components later, while requiring the least amount of modifications to the production code (and thus hopefully less bugs introduced into working code-paths). Additionally, how you represent your data may allow for easier extension of the data type or additional, related data type processing later. I do a lot of data mining, and the first step is always securing the data source and archiving it. There have been times where I wasn't able to revisit the project and finish the actual parser of the data for 5-6 months, at which point I can run through the old data. Other times, I'll write the parser but we'll only be parsing a subset of the data we acqiured. The additional unparsed portionisn't necessarily without merit, it's just not something we are dealing with yet (either because it's still of an unknown quality, or requires more effort than we want to spend at that moment). Knowing it's there and that it may need to be parsed in the future can subtly affect your design such that you leave yourself the openings you'll later need to easily parse this additional data. Sometimes that's as simple as just avoiding situations that would make it extremely cumbersome later, and not necessarily actively making it easier. I'm not sure ignoring something as obvious as this makes one a good developer, but what's "obvious" and what isn't is actually quite different at different software engineering experience levels.
- mickronome 9y ago
  Depends on which meaure of good in use obviously, but I have never seen anyone capable of being efficient over significant time spans without in some way having design and architecture be guided by principles that balance cost of change, cost of implementation, and difficulty of understanding. Ignoring cost of change can be absolutely devastating in the long run, but believing you can somehow scry the future for all possible extension points necessary is equally so. Designing for (anticipated) change in my mind is not at all about adding hooks, API's, or any code at all for that matter. I think of it more like making sure your system respect analogues to gravity and the other natural laws as best translated into the more abstract relations relevant for the particular kind of system you are building. One could call it programmer and refactoring friendly design and not miss the target by much.
kbenson 9y ago
I don't know if it's because it's early and my coffee isn't done yet, or that's too dense of a phrase, it's just me, or some combination thereof, but it took two reads of that phrase, a complete and thoughtful read of your comment, and then two additional reads of that phrase before I was able to unpack it enough to makes sense of it and how your comment tied into it. I'm leaning towards the coffee explanation, but multiple negative (or negative connotating) words probably didn't help...
- mhurd 9y ago
  Yeah, it's a bit dense. Sorry about that.
  - kbenson 9y ago
    No need to apologize, I agree with the assessment. In the clear light of day, that comment was just me vomiting words onto the forum in the vain attempt to justify the effort I put into grokking that comment. :/
    - mhurd 9y ago
      "The best architecture is no architecture" ... became a popular catchphrase for me in the early nineties. I built a streaming kind of trading system back then that integrated data flow and functional views, as some problems were easier to grok in one and harder in the other. Just thinking about things as simple functions: a = f(b) and code as a way of organising like with like worked for me. Sometimes the object approach gets a bit silly. Organisation by the first parameter being special doesn't always work too well. For example, GAMS is a better classification for math than simply putting all vector or matrix code in the one classification. Curation is hard at the end of the day.
      - mslate 9y ago
        How much automated/acceptance/regression testing did you guys have? Would "releases" cause major brick-shitting (like the instance where Mr. L deployed a problematic release)?

by vxxzy 9y ago

lmm 9y ago

> The sign of a good developer is attempting to look ahead and wonder how else will data need to be presented and manipulated - building the system open-ended enough to allow for the evolution of business needs. I've gradually become convinced of just the opposite: a good developer doesn't think ahead at all. The best way to prepare for the evolution of business needs isn't to add extension hooks in the middle of your code, it's to keep the code as simple as possible so that you can change it in a very direct way as and when you need to.

hderms 9y ago
I agree in the sense that your system will be the most flexible provided you use composeable and easy to understand code as much as possible. Overengineering is overengineering because it trades complexity for "flexibility" but the real goal is to keep complexity down as much as possible.
arethuza 9y ago
I've convinced that 95% if the "extension points" I've seen built into code over the years never get used to create extensions - usually because they have significant assumptions about what extensions would be required that turn out to be very wrong.
- hinkley 9y ago
  There are subtle ways to add extension points that most people won’t even notice. For instance, putting related code into a data structure allows you to add more to it later without replumbing the whole system (as opposed to functions with five arguments). With enough experience with refactoring, just choosing a structure that’s easy to refactor can serve as an extension point. (I have even tricked people into implementing a feature the way I had it in my head by writing the intermediate version in such a way to suggest a simple change for part 2.)
- mickronome 9y ago
  Never add any extension points you don't already need, but design as if you could suddenly be tasked with adding all kinds of weird ones, but mostly without spending any significant time. Try to make sure that reasonable extensions are cheap to add, and that even some of the more unreasonable ones are at least possible without complete system redesign. This should not significantly impact either implementation time, or design time. But it will almost certainly make you avoid some really bad design choices that make quite plausible changes extremely expensive. Good design is more about avoiding obvious traps than finding a path to nirvana.
kbenson 9y ago
It's not always about a hook, sometimes it's about where yo break into subsystems and subfunctions. Breaking it up at the right point allows for easy extension through writing new components later, while requiring the least amount of modifications to the production code (and thus hopefully less bugs introduced into working code-paths). Additionally, how you represent your data may allow for easier extension of the data type or additional, related data type processing later. I do a lot of data mining, and the first step is always securing the data source and archiving it. There have been times where I wasn't able to revisit the project and finish the actual parser of the data for 5-6 months, at which point I can run through the old data. Other times, I'll write the parser but we'll only be parsing a subset of the data we acqiured. The additional unparsed portionisn't necessarily without merit, it's just not something we are dealing with yet (either because it's still of an unknown quality, or requires more effort than we want to spend at that moment). Knowing it's there and that it may need to be parsed in the future can subtly affect your design such that you leave yourself the openings you'll later need to easily parse this additional data. Sometimes that's as simple as just avoiding situations that would make it extremely cumbersome later, and not necessarily actively making it easier. I'm not sure ignoring something as obvious as this makes one a good developer, but what's "obvious" and what isn't is actually quite different at different software engineering experience levels.
mickronome 9y ago
Depends on which meaure of good in use obviously, but I have never seen anyone capable of being efficient over significant time spans without in some way having design and architecture be guided by principles that balance cost of change, cost of implementation, and difficulty of understanding. Ignoring cost of change can be absolutely devastating in the long run, but believing you can somehow scry the future for all possible extension points necessary is equally so. Designing for (anticipated) change in my mind is not at all about adding hooks, API's, or any code at all for that matter. I think of it more like making sure your system respect analogues to gravity and the other natural laws as best translated into the more abstract relations relevant for the particular kind of system you are building. One could call it programmer and refactoring friendly design and not miss the target by much.

kbenson 9y ago

I don't know if it's because it's early and my coffee isn't done yet, or that's too dense of a phrase, it's just me, or some combination thereof, but it took two reads of that phrase, a complete and thoughtful read of your comment, and then two additional reads of that phrase before I was able to unpack it enough to makes sense of it and how your comment tied into it. I'm leaning towards the coffee explanation, but multiple negative (or negative connotating) words probably didn't help...

mhurd 9y ago
Yeah, it's a bit dense. Sorry about that.
- kbenson 9y ago
  No need to apologize, I agree with the assessment. In the clear light of day, that comment was just me vomiting words onto the forum in the vain attempt to justify the effort I put into grokking that comment. :/
  - mhurd 9y ago
    "The best architecture is no architecture" ... became a popular catchphrase for me in the early nineties. I built a streaming kind of trading system back then that integrated data flow and functional views, as some problems were easier to grok in one and harder in the other. Just thinking about things as simple functions: a = f(b) and code as a way of organising like with like worked for me. Sometimes the object approach gets a bit silly. Organisation by the first parameter being special doesn't always work too well. For example, GAMS is a better classification for math than simply putting all vector or matrix code in the one classification. Curation is hard at the end of the day.
    - mslate 9y ago
      How much automated/acceptance/regression testing did you guys have? Would "releases" cause major brick-shitting (like the instance where Mr. L deployed a problematic release)?