4 ms·

If you want to see how a properly referenced text looks like, pick any of the following: * Code Complete - McConnell * The Economics of Software Quality - Cap

by blub 7y ago

If you want to see how a properly referenced text looks like, pick any of the following: * Code Complete - McConnell * The Economics of Software Quality - Capers Jones * Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering - Robert Glass * Making Software - Oram & Wilson ... and there are many others. Not all references have survived the test of time, L. Bossavit describes in his book " Leprechauns of Software Engineering" how several software development "facts" are in fact myths. The approach you suggest suffers from a chicken & egg problem because you first have to be experienced enough to be able to evaluate such reference-free content, as the blog written by Martin Fowler. It's precisely the inexperienced that are likely to internalize such advice and perpetuate personality cults. Your objections are invalid; one does not need to be better at a task than an individual in order to criticize them. Asking for references and proof is perfectly legitimate, at least if we want to approach our discipline more as engineering and less as "Strunk & White" as someone comically suggested in another comment.,

Barrin92 7y ago
>Your objections are invalid; one does not need to be better at a task than an individual in order to criticize them. Asking for references and proof is perfectly legitimate, at least if we want to approach our discipline more as engineering and less as "Strunk & White" as someone comically suggested in another comment Software development, as often as comparisons are made to engineering or science is neither. It's a craft. The tools differ from person to person, each piece of software is different, a lot of practises are learned and tacit and transmitted from one pracitioner to the next. Writing code is more like being a blacksmith than being a scientist, as much as people yearn for formalistic answers and peer reviewed studies so that they can have the appearance of objectivity, a lot of software development is fundamentally subjective.
- blub 7y ago
  Software development does have a certain Darwinian character - whatever survives and thrives can't be wrong. Embracing this seems misguided, because as software becomes more complex, it's no longer enough to have software blacksmiths banging away with their software hammers and unit testing the end result into a releasable shape. Teams working on high-availability, high-reliability software know this and take a rigorous approach. Too many take the BDD approach (blog-driven development) and when the thing inevitably falls apart, the customers pick up the broken pieces.
  - atoav 7y ago
    > Software development does have a certain Darwinian character - whatever survives and thrives can't be wrong. I am not sure of that. A lot of what we see today is just adding an abstraction on top of other abstractions. People use five frameworks for a static webpage that could have been easily made in half a day using editor, css and html without ever writing a single line of javascript. In a evolutionary sense it works for them, but the reason isn't that html and css wouldn't also work, the reason is that they believe they have to use it. So I'd be careful with the darwinian comparison here, this is more a mimetic or meme-like evolution of ideas and once the layer below is abstracted away it is quite easy to just forget about it alltogether.
    - rhizome 7y ago
      A lot of what we see today is just adding an abstraction on top of other abstractions. People use five frameworks for a static webpage that could have been easily made in half a day using editor, css and html without ever writing a single line of javascript. Not to speak for them, but I think it's more that despite decades of ridicule, there's still a lot of COBOL out there humming along. Some of it might even be deciding whether or not your health insurance is going to cover that thing that you went to the doctor for the other day. See also: Visual Basic, ColdFusion and so on.
  - inopinatus 7y ago
    > Teams working on high-availability, high-reliability software know this and take a rigorous approach Approaches that are, nevertheless, still more akin to philosophy than engineering.
    - blub 7y ago
      Please detail your understanding of what philosophy is and how it resembles what such teams are doing. My gut feeling is that they're quite different, but I could be missing something...
      - inopinatus 7y ago
- mlthoughts2018 7y ago
  The rampant semantic games about art vs science vs engineering vs craft littering this thread are nauseating. It’s all of those things in different contexts and situations, and regardless, seeking evidence backed advice is the right thing to do no matter what context you’re in. My electrician father doesn’t base his craft on thought leading blogs. He has actual textbooks on electrical equipment, and guides with examples on using tools and solving certain common problems, full of reference material to other books. I happen to think software is something like 70% craft, 25% science and 5% art, and to me this suggests not putting much stock in armchair blog opinions (and yes that includes Fowler’s) and instead seek scientific or data-backed analyses, even for craftsmanship such as any of the references in the comment above yours.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Chris2048 7y ago
  Software development is indeed not "engineering or science"; But that doesn't mean it has to be "craft" or other highly subjective fields, nor that we can't aim for similar standards as other engineering disciplines. > Writing code is more like being a blacksmith than being a scientist ... a lot of software development is fundamentally subjective. But writing code is more like engineering than science, so why not compare those? There is subjectivity to engineering design too, but plenty objectivity in the constraints - what make something "fundamentally" subjective versus some other kind of subjective? Is it possible we don't need to compare programming to any other profession? We can instead identify there is subjectivity in software development, and that some (but maybe not all) it it could be more objective for a benefit.
hutzlibu 7y ago
"Your objections are invalid; one does not need to be better at a task than an individual in order to criticize them" He did not say that. He said, that he wants concrete criticism, what ideas are wrong and if possible, why ...
inopinatus 7y ago
Referencing and evidence has never been a benchmark requirement for works of philosophy.

by blub 7y ago

Barrin92 7y ago

>Your objections are invalid; one does not need to be better at a task than an individual in order to criticize them. Asking for references and proof is perfectly legitimate, at least if we want to approach our discipline more as engineering and less as "Strunk & White" as someone comically suggested in another comment Software development, as often as comparisons are made to engineering or science is neither. It's a craft. The tools differ from person to person, each piece of software is different, a lot of practises are learned and tacit and transmitted from one pracitioner to the next. Writing code is more like being a blacksmith than being a scientist, as much as people yearn for formalistic answers and peer reviewed studies so that they can have the appearance of objectivity, a lot of software development is fundamentally subjective.

blub 7y ago
Software development does have a certain Darwinian character - whatever survives and thrives can't be wrong. Embracing this seems misguided, because as software becomes more complex, it's no longer enough to have software blacksmiths banging away with their software hammers and unit testing the end result into a releasable shape. Teams working on high-availability, high-reliability software know this and take a rigorous approach. Too many take the BDD approach (blog-driven development) and when the thing inevitably falls apart, the customers pick up the broken pieces.
- atoav 7y ago
  > Software development does have a certain Darwinian character - whatever survives and thrives can't be wrong. I am not sure of that. A lot of what we see today is just adding an abstraction on top of other abstractions. People use five frameworks for a static webpage that could have been easily made in half a day using editor, css and html without ever writing a single line of javascript. In a evolutionary sense it works for them, but the reason isn't that html and css wouldn't also work, the reason is that they believe they have to use it. So I'd be careful with the darwinian comparison here, this is more a mimetic or meme-like evolution of ideas and once the layer below is abstracted away it is quite easy to just forget about it alltogether.
  - rhizome 7y ago
    A lot of what we see today is just adding an abstraction on top of other abstractions. People use five frameworks for a static webpage that could have been easily made in half a day using editor, css and html without ever writing a single line of javascript. Not to speak for them, but I think it's more that despite decades of ridicule, there's still a lot of COBOL out there humming along. Some of it might even be deciding whether or not your health insurance is going to cover that thing that you went to the doctor for the other day. See also: Visual Basic, ColdFusion and so on.
- inopinatus 7y ago
  > Teams working on high-availability, high-reliability software know this and take a rigorous approach Approaches that are, nevertheless, still more akin to philosophy than engineering.
  - blub 7y ago
    Please detail your understanding of what philosophy is and how it resembles what such teams are doing. My gut feeling is that they're quite different, but I could be missing something...
    - inopinatus 7y ago
mlthoughts2018 7y ago
The rampant semantic games about art vs science vs engineering vs craft littering this thread are nauseating. It’s all of those things in different contexts and situations, and regardless, seeking evidence backed advice is the right thing to do no matter what context you’re in. My electrician father doesn’t base his craft on thought leading blogs. He has actual textbooks on electrical equipment, and guides with examples on using tools and solving certain common problems, full of reference material to other books. I happen to think software is something like 70% craft, 25% science and 5% art, and to me this suggests not putting much stock in armchair blog opinions (and yes that includes Fowler’s) and instead seek scientific or data-backed analyses, even for craftsmanship such as any of the references in the comment above yours.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Chris2048 7y ago
Software development is indeed not "engineering or science"; But that doesn't mean it has to be "craft" or other highly subjective fields, nor that we can't aim for similar standards as other engineering disciplines. > Writing code is more like being a blacksmith than being a scientist ... a lot of software development is fundamentally subjective. But writing code is more like engineering than science, so why not compare those? There is subjectivity to engineering design too, but plenty objectivity in the constraints - what make something "fundamentally" subjective versus some other kind of subjective? Is it possible we don't need to compare programming to any other profession? We can instead identify there is subjectivity in software development, and that some (but maybe not all) it it could be more objective for a benefit.

hutzlibu 7y ago

"Your objections are invalid; one does not need to be better at a task than an individual in order to criticize them" He did not say that. He said, that he wants concrete criticism, what ideas are wrong and if possible, why ...

inopinatus 7y ago

Referencing and evidence has never been a benchmark requirement for works of philosophy.