3 ms·

Yeah, the difference is about acedemia vs reality - real life is not a happy case - happy case is side case.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
I was just referring to a paper I wrote, some years ago[0], about a [quite successful] system that I designed. It has become widely adopted, and has been taken over by a new, energetic, and highly-talented team. It is something that many in today's industry would sneer at. It's a primitive, mostly-procedural PHP framework that fails to achieve Buzzword Bingo. I deliberately designed it to be primitive. It is meant to be taken up by fairly unskilled users, and implemented in spartan, low-tech environments. It's really quite successful. The important parts are that the code quality is extremely high, as is the robustness of the system. I don't know if I've ever gotten a question about the code. In fact, I'm really just teats on a boar hog, as far as the current team is concerned. I don't think there's one blessed technical thing that I can offer them. It only took them a month or so to grok the system. They did sneer at it a lot, but they have yet to rewrite it in node.js (but they have written some excellent adapters for it in Node). I'm a big believer in functionality and utility over purity. It needs to work, and work well. Pretty is nice, but Quality and Applicability are the Principal goals. [0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/bmlt/ https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/bmlt/
- majkinetor 5y ago
  > Pretty is nice, but Quality and Applicability are the Principal goals. Speed of maintenance is of ultimate importance with software that changes frequently. You may call this pretty, but in my book its principal goal.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
    You haven't seen my software (which is easy to do. Just look at my HN handle). It's pretty easy to maintain. In fact, the gist of what I just wrote, is that I deliberately avoid trendy and fancy, in favor of Quality and maintainability. Additionally, high Quality code tends to need less maintenance.

I was just referring to a paper I wrote, some years ago[0], about a [quite successful] system that I designed. It has become widely adopted, and has been taken over by a new, energetic, and highly-talented team. It is something that many in today's industry would sneer at. It's a primitive, mostly-procedural PHP framework that fails to achieve Buzzword Bingo. I deliberately designed it to be primitive. It is meant to be taken up by fairly unskilled users, and implemented in spartan, low-tech environments. It's really quite successful. The important parts are that the code quality is extremely high, as is the robustness of the system. I don't know if I've ever gotten a question about the code. In fact, I'm really just teats on a boar hog, as far as the current team is concerned. I don't think there's one blessed technical thing that I can offer them. It only took them a month or so to grok the system. They did sneer at it a lot, but they have yet to rewrite it in node.js (but they have written some excellent adapters for it in Node). I'm a big believer in functionality and utility over purity. It needs to work, and work well. Pretty is nice, but Quality and Applicability are the Principal goals. [0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/bmlt/ https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/bmlt/

majkinetor 5y ago
> Pretty is nice, but Quality and Applicability are the Principal goals. Speed of maintenance is of ultimate importance with software that changes frequently. You may call this pretty, but in my book its principal goal.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  You haven't seen my software (which is easy to do. Just look at my HN handle). It's pretty easy to maintain. In fact, the gist of what I just wrote, is that I deliberately avoid trendy and fancy, in favor of Quality and maintainability. Additionally, high Quality code tends to need less maintenance.