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Software development does have a certain Darwinian character - whatever survives and thrives can't be wrong. Embracing this seems misguided, because as softwar

by 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
    I don’t reward sealioning.
    - Chris2048 7y ago
      > Sealioning is a type of trolling or harassment which consists of pursuing people with persistent requests for evidence or repeated questions Asking what you mean by what you wrote in a public discussion forum isn't seasoning. You aren't being asked for evidence for you opinion, but what that opinion is, and the context of a discussion forum implies you mean to discuss the topic. Also, I can't see the "persistence" or bad-faith that would make it trolling.
      - inopinatus 7y ago
        I looked at the correspondent’s other posts in the same thread. They qualified.
    - blub 7y ago
      All right, but if we take the standard definition of philosophy then your initial claim makes no sense. The study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality and existence is unrelated to writing software.
      - 7y ago
onemoresoop 7y ago
Not sure I agree. One example. Theres a lot of mainframe code still in production, it survived and it’s still doing its job to this day. The reason it survived is because replacing it is very very costly.

by blub 7y ago

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
  I don’t reward sealioning.
  - Chris2048 7y ago
    > Sealioning is a type of trolling or harassment which consists of pursuing people with persistent requests for evidence or repeated questions Asking what you mean by what you wrote in a public discussion forum isn't seasoning. You aren't being asked for evidence for you opinion, but what that opinion is, and the context of a discussion forum implies you mean to discuss the topic. Also, I can't see the "persistence" or bad-faith that would make it trolling.
    - inopinatus 7y ago
      I looked at the correspondent’s other posts in the same thread. They qualified.
  - blub 7y ago
    All right, but if we take the standard definition of philosophy then your initial claim makes no sense. The study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality and existence is unrelated to writing software.
    - 7y ago

onemoresoop 7y ago

Not sure I agree. One example. Theres a lot of mainframe code still in production, it survived and it’s still doing its job to this day. The reason it survived is because replacing it is very very costly.