3 ms·

>The question for the industry remains: how do we deal with systems that should be up for 10 years? 25 yrs? 50 yrs? 100 yrs? We didn't even have computers as th

>The question for the industry remains: how do we deal with systems that should be up for 10 years? 25 yrs? 50 yrs? 100 yrs? We didn't even have computers as they exist today 50 years ago. Is this a question the industry actually cares about? If anything, I'd say it got much worse at creating long-living software. It sucks to run a mainframe-based system from 50 years ago, but running a 10-year-old Web Forms application can be borderline impossible. I'm scared to think of what will happen with all the cloud-based stuff in the next 10 years. >How do we separate business logic in a self-contained way that can be independent of hardware and (from a certain level) software? I often say that there is no such thing as "business" logic. There is just logic. The least maintainable systems I've worked with were the ones with the most sophisticated attempts at abstraction. In my opinion, the key to software longevity is making systems that allow for local reasoning, i.e. analyzing parts without knowing the whole. This can be achieved in a lot of different ways, but it needs to be a deliberate goal in system design.

bartread 8y ago
> The least maintainable systems I've worked with were the ones with the most sophisticated attempts at abstraction. Seconded. Enterprise patterns mandating layers and layers of abstraction, making it incredibly hard to reason about the far flung pieces of code that actually do anything.
raverbashing 8y ago
I agree it's a tough cookie. I actually don't think layers and layers of abstraction is a good idea. But something were you can describe something like "Read this value from this field, do some math based on fields in another table, return the result" That's why I raised the question, how do we do that over long periods of time without rewriting it in several different ways? (ASM to flat files, COBOL and JAVA to different SQL flavours, what else is next?) And if you migrate, let's say from Oracle to MSSQL it will work for 90% of the things, for the last 10% it will be a PITA.
dx034 8y ago
> Is this a question the industry actually cares about? If anything, I'd say it got much worse at creating long-living software. It sucks to run a mainframe-based system from 50 years ago, but running a 10-year-old Web Forms application can be borderline impossible. I'm scared to think of what will happen with all the cloud-based stuff in the next 10 years. Cloud deployments, especially modular systems (and of course microservices) are often sold to companies as the best way to reduce technical debt. I don't think they've been around for long enough to truly test it but would be curious if a 30yr old system of microservices running in containers is easier to update than COBOL software running on a mainframe.

bartread 8y ago

> The least maintainable systems I've worked with were the ones with the most sophisticated attempts at abstraction. Seconded. Enterprise patterns mandating layers and layers of abstraction, making it incredibly hard to reason about the far flung pieces of code that actually do anything.

raverbashing 8y ago

I agree it's a tough cookie. I actually don't think layers and layers of abstraction is a good idea. But something were you can describe something like "Read this value from this field, do some math based on fields in another table, return the result" That's why I raised the question, how do we do that over long periods of time without rewriting it in several different ways? (ASM to flat files, COBOL and JAVA to different SQL flavours, what else is next?) And if you migrate, let's say from Oracle to MSSQL it will work for 90% of the things, for the last 10% it will be a PITA.

dx034 8y ago

> Is this a question the industry actually cares about? If anything, I'd say it got much worse at creating long-living software. It sucks to run a mainframe-based system from 50 years ago, but running a 10-year-old Web Forms application can be borderline impossible. I'm scared to think of what will happen with all the cloud-based stuff in the next 10 years. Cloud deployments, especially modular systems (and of course microservices) are often sold to companies as the best way to reduce technical debt. I don't think they've been around for long enough to truly test it but would be curious if a 30yr old system of microservices running in containers is easier to update than COBOL software running on a mainframe.