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Software's Dirty Little Secret
- silentbicycle 18y agoSummary: Software tends to grow haphazardly, and often instead of being internally organized in any fashion, more code is just piled on. As code bases grow, they become very hard to manage, and "smaller and nimbler" competition can step in. If this is a secret, it's a pretty open one. taps copy of Thinking Forth, c. 1984.
- swombat 18y agoThere needs to be a consistent way of writing software that runs on different systems and in different situations that considers a number of different factors Umm, right, sure. And how do you propose to do that when the field evolves so fast that most technical books go out of date within 2 years? There doesn't need to be any such consistent way. What there needs to be is already there, for the simple reason that what is there is driven by exactly that: needs. Where absolute reliability is required (e.g. NASA), programs are written with that kind of discipline. For the rest of us who are ok with living in a giant, glorious mess of creativity, why should anyone dictate how we do things?
- gaius 18y agoMethodologist hawks methodology; film at 11.