5 ms·

In my experience, the limit does not depend on the volume as such, but more the complexity. This complexity can be intrinsic frombthe business domain, or accu

In my experience, the limit does not depend on the volume as such, but more the complexity. This complexity can be intrinsic frombthe business domain, or accudental from technical choices. If frontend, backend and storage have parallell structure based on predictable patterns, the triple line cost is easily ignorable by skimming. Development heavily slows down under unpredictability. Maintainance is slower partially because knowledge loss hightens unpredictability. One-off half-documented pseudo-frameworks create much higher knowledge loss in maintenance, and are a much worse time eater than simple code, even if tripled.

lovasoa 3y ago
Hey, I'm Ophir, the co-author of the post, and main contributor to the SQLPage one-off half-documented pseudo-framework :) I'm not sure if you had a look at what SQLPage really does. It is not a framework in the same sense as Django, Rails, or Laravel. It doesn't have a large set of functions you need to interact with. It lets you write the database queries you would have written anyway to get data out of your database, and just renders that as a nice frontend. All the components you can use for rendering are heavily documented with many examples on https://sql.ophir.dev/documentation.sql https://sql.ophir.dev/documentation.sql
- hyperman1 3y ago
  OK, here is a severe misunderstanding brewing. I definitely did not mean SQLPage when I said one-off half-documented pseudo-framework. In fact, I did not mean any real, standalone, named product with this. I do however see very much how you could think so from my description, so my apologies. What I meant: consider any random big software development. It might be mind-numbingly boring, very technically repetitive, you might have devs who never did any maintenance, or devs being expensive got the command to start building something anything while the business has yet to start delivering something resembling requirements. In this kind of case, programmers tend to start building abstractions based on their imagined needs, with an We-will-add-the-business-stuff-later attitude. The results are generally some kind of architecture astronaut horror. Abstraction will be very high, weird features and handling of useless corner cases will abound. In-code documentation, logging, debugging features will be absent. Higher level documentation was either not written or lost long ago. That's your average one-off half-documented pseudo-framework. I've seen plenty of these (and committed a few crimes of my own). From the top of my head, some of the worst: * A full-blown 3000 lines templating library, for rendering exactly 1 report that was basically a for loop dumping an sql query to a html file. * A C10K database connection manager built on top of apache commons pooling (which while a good library was not fit for this purpose at all), hyperoptimized for TCP port open/close speed, for an application making at most a few connections per minute. * A cache manager for files, deciding when to remove a file based on either AI or linear regression, with a web UI for configuring this decision and all the zillion config parameters and strategies, but the time to generate the cached data was shorter than the time to read it from disk and the files easily lived for months. * A java message building code that did everything humanly possible to only allocate a big buffer once at the beginning because 'GC is too slow', but the coder forgot how joining strings together created temporaries that were of course cleaned up by the GC. Needless to say, the people maintaining these beast cursed the devs who implemented them, and tended to rip them out on sight if possible, or pay the very heavy maintenance cost.
  - whstl 3y ago
    "In this kind of case, programmers tend to start building abstractions based on their imagined needs, with an We-will-add-the-business-stuff-later attitude" I wish I could publish examples from my current codebase, because that's exactly what happened. Difficult and verbose abstractions, with sometimes 50 classes being involved in displaying a simple table (one class per column display, one class per filterable column), and that's just the "R" part of CRUD. And there are 6 or 7 different teams working on it, and each one uses different methodologies to do their work. In some cases it's abstractions on top of GraphQL. Everyone involved had the best intentions possible, but the end result doesn't reflect it.
vendiddy 3y ago
Relevant quote from the book "A Philosophy of Software Design" Complexity is what a developer experiences at a particular point in time when trying to achieve a particular goal. It doesn’t necessarily relate to the overall size or functionality of the system. People often use the word “complex” to describe large systems with sophisticated features, but if such a system is easy to work on, then, for the purposes of this book, it is not complex. Of course, almost all large and sophisticated software systems are in fact hard to work on, so they also meet my definition of complexity, but this need not necessarily be the case. It is also possible for a small and unsophisticated system to be quite complex.

lovasoa 3y ago

Hey, I'm Ophir, the co-author of the post, and main contributor to the SQLPage one-off half-documented pseudo-framework :) I'm not sure if you had a look at what SQLPage really does. It is not a framework in the same sense as Django, Rails, or Laravel. It doesn't have a large set of functions you need to interact with. It lets you write the database queries you would have written anyway to get data out of your database, and just renders that as a nice frontend. All the components you can use for rendering are heavily documented with many examples on https://sql.ophir.dev/documentation.sql https://sql.ophir.dev/documentation.sql

hyperman1 3y ago
OK, here is a severe misunderstanding brewing. I definitely did not mean SQLPage when I said one-off half-documented pseudo-framework. In fact, I did not mean any real, standalone, named product with this. I do however see very much how you could think so from my description, so my apologies. What I meant: consider any random big software development. It might be mind-numbingly boring, very technically repetitive, you might have devs who never did any maintenance, or devs being expensive got the command to start building something anything while the business has yet to start delivering something resembling requirements. In this kind of case, programmers tend to start building abstractions based on their imagined needs, with an We-will-add-the-business-stuff-later attitude. The results are generally some kind of architecture astronaut horror. Abstraction will be very high, weird features and handling of useless corner cases will abound. In-code documentation, logging, debugging features will be absent. Higher level documentation was either not written or lost long ago. That's your average one-off half-documented pseudo-framework. I've seen plenty of these (and committed a few crimes of my own). From the top of my head, some of the worst: * A full-blown 3000 lines templating library, for rendering exactly 1 report that was basically a for loop dumping an sql query to a html file. * A C10K database connection manager built on top of apache commons pooling (which while a good library was not fit for this purpose at all), hyperoptimized for TCP port open/close speed, for an application making at most a few connections per minute. * A cache manager for files, deciding when to remove a file based on either AI or linear regression, with a web UI for configuring this decision and all the zillion config parameters and strategies, but the time to generate the cached data was shorter than the time to read it from disk and the files easily lived for months. * A java message building code that did everything humanly possible to only allocate a big buffer once at the beginning because 'GC is too slow', but the coder forgot how joining strings together created temporaries that were of course cleaned up by the GC. Needless to say, the people maintaining these beast cursed the devs who implemented them, and tended to rip them out on sight if possible, or pay the very heavy maintenance cost.
- whstl 3y ago
  "In this kind of case, programmers tend to start building abstractions based on their imagined needs, with an We-will-add-the-business-stuff-later attitude" I wish I could publish examples from my current codebase, because that's exactly what happened. Difficult and verbose abstractions, with sometimes 50 classes being involved in displaying a simple table (one class per column display, one class per filterable column), and that's just the "R" part of CRUD. And there are 6 or 7 different teams working on it, and each one uses different methodologies to do their work. In some cases it's abstractions on top of GraphQL. Everyone involved had the best intentions possible, but the end result doesn't reflect it.

vendiddy 3y ago

Relevant quote from the book "A Philosophy of Software Design" Complexity is what a developer experiences at a particular point in time when trying to achieve a particular goal. It doesn’t necessarily relate to the overall size or functionality of the system. People often use the word “complex” to describe large systems with sophisticated features, but if such a system is easy to work on, then, for the purposes of this book, it is not complex. Of course, almost all large and sophisticated software systems are in fact hard to work on, so they also meet my definition of complexity, but this need not necessarily be the case. It is also possible for a small and unsophisticated system to be quite complex.