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> Down that path also lies madness. Ohhhhh so true. I sadly have no such story to tell regarding performance optimization, but figuring out the intricacies of

> Down that path also lies madness. Ohhhhh so true. I sadly have no such story to tell regarding performance optimization, but figuring out the intricacies of any complex system (for me at least) inevitably leads to you knowing arcane stuff that might come in handy some time. But on the other hand, it also - in my humble experience - leads to you knowing a lot of arcane stuff that might have an impact on a problem, but is absolutely not related in the specific case one is dealing with. Knowing when to discard arcane knowledge and when to jump onto that train of thought imho is crucial. But on the other hand debugging arcane stuff in complex systems is just so much fun. One learns so much.

ganafagol 6y ago
People should know about that more so that they can learn lessons. Any "little tweak" to an otherwise simple and elegant spec increases complexity which generations will have to deal with. This complexity often times compounds exponentially. Just see the interaction between Nagle and delayed acks. Each on their own they sound like a cool idea, but the compounding complexity is what kills understanding. Unfortunately, new generations don't learn the lesson. Modern web dev for example has so many layers of complexity and bloat, and they all interact and you need to know all layers intimitly for any real understanding as the complexity explodes. It does not have to be that way, if only every layer has a clean, small abstraction. Then you don't need to know the details, only the small spec. But that does not work if everybody just adds a hack here and there which breaks some separation but oh well. And that's why we can't have nice things.
- slx26 6y ago
  There's nothing that makes me sadder in the world. How a lack of understanding can poison what could otherwise be in our reach, and moves it again further away from our understanding. It's almost as if we love "simple" because it's the perfect platform to start complicating. I mean, it's everywhere, not just IT systems. And part of it is unavoidable, but... when you start looking at it, it becomes impossible to unsee. So many absurd roadblocks, so much wasted potential.
  - Sodman 6y ago
    But $LARGE_CLIENT told our sales guy that if we were to just implement $ARBITRARY_CHECKBOX_FEATURE in our advanced configuration they'd sign a 7 figure deal!
    - staticassertion 6y ago
      Uh, yeah, if you have millions of dollars lined up and you turn it down to maintain some sense of technical purity, I hope your revenue is in the billions.
      - ganafagol 6y ago
        But that's not how this works. Customers order a feature. They don't order how messed up your implementation of that feature is. In other words, the agreement with the customer is the spec. But this discussion is about the implementation. Conflating these two is one of the major problems in our industry.
  - Terr_ 6y ago
    On the other hand, there may be comfort in the fatalism that it's just a feature of the universe. Cell biology, for example, seems littered with stuff that just happens to work 51% of the time due to what appear to be crazy sideways interactions.

ganafagol 6y ago

People should know about that more so that they can learn lessons. Any "little tweak" to an otherwise simple and elegant spec increases complexity which generations will have to deal with. This complexity often times compounds exponentially. Just see the interaction between Nagle and delayed acks. Each on their own they sound like a cool idea, but the compounding complexity is what kills understanding. Unfortunately, new generations don't learn the lesson. Modern web dev for example has so many layers of complexity and bloat, and they all interact and you need to know all layers intimitly for any real understanding as the complexity explodes. It does not have to be that way, if only every layer has a clean, small abstraction. Then you don't need to know the details, only the small spec. But that does not work if everybody just adds a hack here and there which breaks some separation but oh well. And that's why we can't have nice things.

slx26 6y ago
There's nothing that makes me sadder in the world. How a lack of understanding can poison what could otherwise be in our reach, and moves it again further away from our understanding. It's almost as if we love "simple" because it's the perfect platform to start complicating. I mean, it's everywhere, not just IT systems. And part of it is unavoidable, but... when you start looking at it, it becomes impossible to unsee. So many absurd roadblocks, so much wasted potential.
- Sodman 6y ago
  But $LARGE_CLIENT told our sales guy that if we were to just implement $ARBITRARY_CHECKBOX_FEATURE in our advanced configuration they'd sign a 7 figure deal!
  - staticassertion 6y ago
    Uh, yeah, if you have millions of dollars lined up and you turn it down to maintain some sense of technical purity, I hope your revenue is in the billions.
    - ganafagol 6y ago
      But that's not how this works. Customers order a feature. They don't order how messed up your implementation of that feature is. In other words, the agreement with the customer is the spec. But this discussion is about the implementation. Conflating these two is one of the major problems in our industry.
- Terr_ 6y ago
  On the other hand, there may be comfort in the fatalism that it's just a feature of the universe. Cell biology, for example, seems littered with stuff that just happens to work 51% of the time due to what appear to be crazy sideways interactions.