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Tightly coupled code is, and should be, the norm. Loose coupling is a pipe dream as soon as domain-specific data structures are involved. Loose coupling over d

Tightly coupled code is, and should be, the norm. Loose coupling is a pipe dream as soon as domain-specific data structures are involved. Loose coupling over domain-specific data structures (and their related procedures) just means that errors that should be caught by a run-of-the-mill type checker are now found in production. An example of this pattern can be seen pretty much whenever you open the developer console in a non-chrome browser on any site using some JavaScript framework. Downloading some code from the website and executing in the browser is an extreme form of loose coupling and by my experience it is pretty much never free of errors, except for the very specific combinations of browser/platform that the developer could test.

ragebol 5y ago
You can have the procedural/functional code only tightly coupled to the datastructures but loose coupling between the other bits.
Zababa 5y ago
You can also see the difficulty of loose coupling when people transition from a monolith to microservices. What used to be a function call is now a network request that can fail in all sorts of interesting ways.
cryptica 5y ago
This line of thinking goes against not only everything that the original inventors of programming languages ever taught, but it goes against almost 20 years of my own professional experience... And I've written and worked on many highly maintainable projects which had loose coupling (including in some very complex business domains). In fact, they're the only 2 rules that have consistently delivered value across all the languages that I've tried and for all different kinds of system that I've built. Closest thing possible to a silver bullet. I find this kind of mindset that x is not possible to be defeatist. Instead of acknowledging that programming is difficult and can take many decades to master, people prefer to pretend that programming is easy but unavoidably messy. People always try to come up with narratives which make it easier to accept mediocrity rather than work hard to keep improving themselves.

ragebol 5y ago

You can have the procedural/functional code only tightly coupled to the datastructures but loose coupling between the other bits.

Zababa 5y ago

You can also see the difficulty of loose coupling when people transition from a monolith to microservices. What used to be a function call is now a network request that can fail in all sorts of interesting ways.

cryptica 5y ago

This line of thinking goes against not only everything that the original inventors of programming languages ever taught, but it goes against almost 20 years of my own professional experience... And I've written and worked on many highly maintainable projects which had loose coupling (including in some very complex business domains). In fact, they're the only 2 rules that have consistently delivered value across all the languages that I've tried and for all different kinds of system that I've built. Closest thing possible to a silver bullet. I find this kind of mindset that x is not possible to be defeatist. Instead of acknowledging that programming is difficult and can take many decades to master, people prefer to pretend that programming is easy but unavoidably messy. People always try to come up with narratives which make it easier to accept mediocrity rather than work hard to keep improving themselves.