12 ms·

Why do web sites and software take so long to build? And why is it so hard?

• j45 14y ago
  It takes so long, because we waste so much time rebuilding logic over and over that is neither re-usable, nor unique. Login/out, passwords, security, roles, reporting. The app logic itself can be written itself but we spend so much time on micro-integration of libraries, or writing them ourselves that we end up wasting a lot of time on things that aren't solving a problem, rather helping to deliver it.
• apinstein 14y ago
  Two comments: 1. When things don't line up like the plans in an analog project, you can just "line them up" and the original intent isn't seriously disturbed. That doesn't work in a hard-logic digital world. 2. That said, "real" projects still can come together more quickly because they are better about using interfaces and being loosely coupled than we (software developers) are. You can slightly move joists, light switches, etc, because the interfaces of how they interact with other components are better defined, and the glue code (ie wires, nails, cuts) can be trivially adjusted to make things fit and still get the desired end outputs. #2 is partly why software "integration" projects can be hacky as hell and still work, they're just glue code for clearly defined interfaces. If we designed our internal applications with such simplicity and clearly-defined interfaces and wired them together rather than coupling them, it'd be more predictable. Unfortunately that's really tough to do for software inventions, as there are so many new things where the interfaces might not even be able to be clearly defined. Construction would look a lot more like software if you ordered wood but when the stack of wood showed up it was metal rods instead, or if it came pre-molded to the shape of another house. There are just too many variables in de novo software. I used to have this debate with my old boss all the time. You either live with the reality and create new, valuable stuff, or if you want to build bridges, go write glue code for legacy systems.
• charlieok 14y ago
  I like the analogy of walking through a dark room with your hand on the wall. As long as your hand is on something you recognize, you know where you are in the room, what ground you've already covered, and you may have some idea of how you're going to reach the other side. I started a rails project very meticulously. I had recently read through the 'Agile' book which closely tracks the development of the framework. I had a decent idea of what I was going to build and how. It would be a tight ship, and code would be kept clean from start to finish. Before even starting the project, I invested a ridiculous amount of time and effort learning all the tools I would be using, evaluating every case where I had a choice between popular and well-supported tools. For each tool I chose, I thought about why using it was a good idea and how exactly it would fit into the workflow. I was determined that every commit would keep tests and documentation up to date with any code changes in that same commit. All that is to say that I came into the project with carefully considered, but fairly rigid, opinions on most aspects of how to do the project. Perhaps not surprisingly, the other developers on the project did not share these opinions. They did things that ran against my idea of how to keep a project organized. Perhaps I also did things which ran against theirs. Eventually, the state of disorganization reached a point that felt to me like letting go of a piece of furniture in a pitch-black room. I no longer had a sense of how the whole thing was put together. I no longer knew what all the 3rd party libraries we were using did, or why they were included in the project. I had planned to keep all libraries up to date but, for various reasons, we were falling behind in that regard and various roadblocks stood in the way of bringing things current. We had started using esoteric features of the database I didn't know very much about. I would do a deep dive of research to try and catch up my understanding, and then I'd fall farther behind in keeping my finger on the pulse of changes in the project. Soon, the codebase had dependencies on various servers in our organization that prevented me from simply running my own isolated instance of it. I don't know a solution to this, yet. Right now I'm still trying to feel my way through that dark room.
  • jdlshore 14y ago
    Pair programming [1] and collective code ownership [2] are great ways of getting everyone on the same page and keeping them up to date. My experience is that only a fraction of developers are interested in keeping things clean and meticulous. The rest are more interested in cranking out features. Both are needed. In my experience, a ratio of 1 "meticulous" to 6 "git-r-done" programmers works fine if you're using collective code ownership & pairing. (The real trick is getting the rest of the team to agree to it.) [1] http://jamesshore.com/Agile-Book/pair_programming.html http://jamesshore.com/Agile-Book/pair_programming.html [2] http://jamesshore.com/Agile-Book/collective_code_ownership.html http://jamesshore.com/Agile-Book/collective_code_ownership.h...
• cbsmith 14y ago
  I think the amazing thing about this post is it suggests an incredibly myopic view of the world. Even if you look at the most basic function of what a web site is and compare it with the non-web version, you see complexity. Billboards, magazines, newspapers, books, etc., all have incredibly complex and intricate development processes, much of which is done by hand. The tools are somewhat more standardized, but that is mostly because the technology is much, much older. You try going back to the first 50 years of those technologies and you'll find it is pretty messy. The reality is that these things get complex and intricate because that is what the system demands. I can make a website in <1 minute. It's not hard. However, it won't stand out amongst the sea of sites out there, which kind of defeats the purpose. This is why tools that facilitate the process, while improving the quality of the final product, don't actually reduce the time it takes to build a site, because improving efficiency just raises the bar higher about what a quality site needs to be.
• JVIDEL 14y ago
  Regular people can't see software, they really can't: for them it's a bunch of crazy numbers and letters, and incredibly boring too which is why media like movies do a montage with meaningless 3D objects and not actual code. That's also the reason why is so easy for people to justify pirating software: is something unsubstantial, "how can it be so expensive? how can it cost more than the computer in which I'm using it? I can see the computer!" is what I hear the most... And it gets even funnier when you consider most coders and pro users can deal with half-baked apps and find a workaround for bugs and glitches, but the average enduser, the kind that barely appreciates good quality software or how much it costs to make it is the first one to complaint when something doesn't works perfectly, even if it actually does but they are too dumb to know how to use it.
• smtuttle 14y ago
  All this discussion -- and no reference to Fred Brooks?! A classic opinion piece on why building software will always be hard is Fred Brooks’ “No Silver Bullet – Essence and Accident in Software Engineering” — there’s a version of this available at: http://people.eecs.ku.edu/~saiedian/Teaching/Sp08/816/Papers/Background-Papers/no-silver-bullet.pdf http://people.eecs.ku.edu/~saiedian/Teaching/Sp08/816/Papers... And if you don’t agree, one of its rebuttals, “What if there’s a Silver Bullet … and the Competition Gets it First?”, by Brad Cox — with a version available at: http://www.virtualschool.edu/cox/pub/92ByteWhatIfSilverBullet/index.html http://www.virtualschool.edu/cox/pub/92ByteWhatIfSilverBulle... …even gets into the idea of an “industrial revolution” for software. Good classic reading… 8-)
• deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
• TheBiv 14y ago
  This http://i.imgur.com/UW5rM.png http://i.imgur.com/UW5rM.png I truly believe that most software developers want to solve problems, and establishing a database error is a problem that people are willing to pay for...thus, there is a class of people that are willing to do the work! EDIT: I'm sure the db connection will come back up, but this error is the root of this discussion, in my opinion. No one wants to be yelled at, so to prevent this, we revert to what "just works" and your idea of that concept is different than mine, thus the more we can agree on standards the better off we will be for the general use case.
  • fsniper 14y ago
    I've seen it but seems like it's OK now.
  • scottporad 14y ago
    gah! sorry. just vanilla wordpress on a shared server. i'll see what i can do.
• seldo 14y ago
  I think getting a "DB Connection Refused" error when I clicked this link was wonderfully appropriate.
  • B-Scan 14y ago
    It's currently in Google's cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=cache%3Awww.scottporad.com%2F2012%2F05%2F06%2Fwhy-do-web-sites-and-software-take-so-long-to-build-and-why-is-it-so-hard%2F http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sourceid=chrome...
  • danh 14y ago
    Thou shalt not use the name of software failure in vain.
  • ranebo 14y ago
    I actually laughed out loud and was a little disappointed to see that this wasn't intended. I'll go read the cached link now.
    • scottporad 14y ago
      I wish I were that clever because, you're right, that would be funny!
  • deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  • scottporad 14y ago
    i think this should be working better now. i added some caching to the blog. it's late where i am, so i'm gonna go to bed. hopefully the site will survive until morning.
• Detrus 14y ago
  To use the plumber analogy, we can't agree on how big the common pipes should be. They have physical limitations set by properties of water and waste. Software handles a liquid of constantly changing viscosity.
• arocks 14y ago
  > Plus, in the history of the world, he said, is there one thing you can think of that has been hand-made, and on such a large scale as software, that was as complex? It is a testimony to the innovation in any field that leads to tools become outdated so quickly. Easy commoditisation is directly related to the tools one has at their disposal. Creative fields like photography or movie-making also face the same issues. Interestingly, if we are given a choice to constantly upgrade our tools then we would always prefer to. For eg: I don't find most people using the cork screw on a swiss-army knife. I would rather have a lighter multi-tool. But redesigning, testing and manufacturing a new multi-tool takes a long time. Software has relatively speaking a much shorter lifecycle. Most of the clients recognise this and sometimes have higher expectations of the turnaround times. This leads to unintentionally short timelines or bug-ridden software. As in any uncertain venture, it is often better to go with iterative and agile methodologies rather than a big bang approach.
• labanux 14y ago
  Like this..
• jheitzeb 14y ago
  Wow, thought-provoking post! I had three reactions to this. 1) Software is in it's early days (in the grand scheme of things.) Though things may seem "hand-made" now, it won't always be the case. In fact I'd say OO, design patterns, frameworks, cloud technologies and more are the early equivalents of regulations, well-accepted standards, etc. 2) What other profession is as egalitarian? What other profession has as much upside? Entire industries can be changed by a few smart people. That kind of opportunity makes the "hassle" worth it. 3) The hassle of having stakeholders/customers constantly wanting things faster and cheaper can easily be mitigated by being picky about what company your work, for, it's business model and it's culture. Not all software companies face that issue.
• anonymous_mouse 14y ago
  Mirrored a copy here, http://jsbin.com/apawin/3 http://jsbin.com/apawin/3 If you have an aversion to using Google cache and would like to see a clean version.
• baddox 14y ago
  I'm not sure I understand the author's definition of "handmade." My Rails web app runs on my handmade code with a bunch of handmade Ruby libraries, on the handmade Ruby language, on physical hardware that was made by handmade machines (or machines made by handmade machines, etc.). How is software any more handmade than any man-made technology, like a cellphone or automobile? The distinction sounds necessarily fuzzy.
  • jes5199 14y ago
    I'm equally bewildered by that. Everything mass-produced is originally designed in CAD, by a person. Those things are more like software than the items made one at a time by craftsmen. It's a false dichotomy.
• ranebo 14y ago
  My dad would start yelling at the screen if he read this article. He runs power tool manufacturing business, that requires each product to be tested and tested to perfection. If there is a fatal flaw the entire line may need to be recalled. The fact I can push a software update to a million users in minutes makes him green with envy. So yes software is hard... but cost free replication is an enormous upside.
  • praptak 14y ago
    Not every piece of software is like that. My updates take time measured in months from the moment developers declare them "done" till the first time a line of code is executed in production. And this is assuming all forks on this path go positive. Not that I'm complaining, just giving some perspective. Maybe this will make your dad less jealous :)
    • ranebo 14y ago
      Sure I can completely see that being the case in many situations (for example all Aircraft software engineers have my utmost thanks :-)), but even then the cost of prototyping changes or testing fixes is made much easier by the malleable nature of code.
• maaku 14y ago
  Except that software is written by machines these days. I stopped writing in assembly language after it stopped being cool in the 90's. Even still, you'd have to be hand-crafting machine code in a hex editor to really get all the machines out of the loop. These days I write in an interpreted language using complex libraries that handle a multitude of protocol choices for me. Even if you argue that each of those tools were at one point hand-crafted, even down to the compiler, there are now development tools that help me write code, from basic code completion and tooltips to the most complex static and runtime analysis. That is machines writing software, with a human in the loop.
  • michaelneale 14y ago
    Exactly - this article makes the very common (still) (1) mistake of thinking construction of software == writing code. Construction of software is compiler/interpreter/all the machinery that kicks in to take some text or instructions and makes it do something. To correct the analogy with building physical things - you could compare the architect designing a bridge (and arguing with engineers about materials and budgets) with writing code - that would be a fair comparison. The construction of software has been automated for some time. This works just fine for construction of physical things because the cost sunk into to the "non construction" bit is tiny compared to the whole project - so no one spends too much time thinking about methodologies and automation of an architect coming up with the concept of a building. (1) I note in the article the person mention spent time as a consultant in a big consulting company - this view is still held by them at least with the last brush I had with organisations like that (and they are incredibly frustrated by it).
    • andrewem 14y ago
      The excellent book "Dreaming in Code" (1) follows a software project that takes way longer than expected, keeps changing goals, and is generally a mess. The author says "If the subject of software’s flaws is discussed for more than a few minutes at a time, it is a certainty that someone will eventually pound a fist on the table and say, “Why can’t we build software the way we build bridges?”". Then he shows how the San Francisco Bay Bridge project ended up going very much like a software project, complete with major changes in specs years into building. And of course, since I'm in Boston I'm required to mention the Big Dig (2), which was a tunnel and bridge project that cost over $14 billion. Oh, and a ceiling panel fell, killing a woman in her car. And the guardrails in the tunnels tend to kill motorcyclists who would otherwise suffer only minor injuries. Plus the all 25,000 of the 120 pound (55 kg) light fixtures in the tunnel ceilings have to be replaced lest more of them fall, maybe killing more people. But yeah, let's keep trying to make software engineering just like civil engineering. 1. http://www.dreamingincode.com/ http://www.dreamingincode.com/ 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig
• chrsstrm 14y ago
  I think wanting a product cheaper and faster is a pretty universal sentiment. I think it can also be said that aside from cooking a meal or buying IKEA furniture, the typical consumer purchases a product that's ready to go with no assembly or lead time required. I like to think that if my (ordinary non-commercial) client assumes something is easily done, that's a compliment to my work. He or she can ask for a new button with a simple function to be added to a page, but they have no comprehension of the complexity behind adding what they see to be a simple element. To the ordinary or non-technical person, there is a lot of "magic" behind what we do (it's just a button, why can't you just add it in?). That lack of understanding combined with how easily we've solved other (seemingly similar) problems gives them no way to properly gauge how long a task should take or what it should cost.
• sparknlaunch12 14y ago
  Not so sure web coding as unique as author makes out. Hand made items - essentially think back to before the industrial age. Most things were hand made. Art, tools, food etc Now we have machines to make things easier. Or we have off shore labour. If it is a precise trade, well sorry but you still need to struggle by hand. You should therefore new charging a premium to do it.
• manmal 14y ago
  The analogy the OP establishes - building a house vs making software - is good (I've actually used it too in debates), but things are not as tightly regulated by the government as the OP claims: * While there are certain constraints a house has to satisfy, architects do have freedom to be creative. They MUST plan such that it will resist certain standard incidents, and they have to plan it such that the floors can carry ~10x the weight you would ever expect there. These regulations vary depending on the region you live in. E.g., in Austria there is the possibility that meters of snow lie on roofs, and architects (or their structural designers) have to keep that in mind when calculating the max weight. You won't find this constraint in Portugal. * Keeping to these constraints does not guarantee a building won't break. Constraints (like requirements) are prone to grow outdated, or be incomplete. In Austria, roofs will sometimes break down when it snows for some days in a row (4m of snow are very heavy). * As incidents in e.g. Turkey and China show, plumbers or other construction workers can do such a bad job ("botching") that buildings just break down after some years. Governmental constraints don't assure quality. Some countries like Dubai won't let local workers unguarded near any expensive building for this exact reason - most of the times, German and other Western workforces are hired to oversee the construction process. I think one could compare governmental constraints on construction work with requirements. A building's floor must be able to carry a weight of 100 tons, and a software system should be able to serve 1000 requests/second - I think that's comparable, and software constraints might even be easier to test. What I think this really boils down to is that software requirements evolve much more quickly, and due to this it's not feasible to establish legal requirements - government would have to issue new requirements every week, adjusting them for technologies like nodejs. Also, how do you establish best practices for bleeding-edge technologies within weeks? Not at all. We are in a constant state of learning and experimenting.
• tablatom 14y ago
  To date, software engineering has failed to deliver on one critical goal, which is why we are in this mess. The world of software development needs to be divided in two -- the component creators, and the component assemblers. To stick with the given analogy, component creators are the people inventing new kinds of plumbing: easier ways of connecting pipes, taps that don't ever drip. Component assemblers are the people fitting out bathrooms. Creating new components is high-end engineering. It needs to happen far away from the day-to-day challenges of making a client happy. To a large extent, this division is already present, but it doesn't go far enough. There has been amazing progress - nowadays we work on top of an incredible stack of technology that we don't have to re-invent, but so far we've not achieved the "last mile". We'll know when we're there because component assembly (i.e. making something for a client) will start to look more like a trade. Today, just getting a regular been-done-a-million-times-before database-driven website (or whatever), requires FAR too much low-level code. This, I think is what is meant here by "hand made". We should be snapping things together, and often we are, but suddenly you get to an awkward bit and you're back to forging a new kind of pipe joint that never existed before.
  • kragen 14y ago
    Programming has delivered spectacularly on that critical goal, although software engineering did indeed fail, which is why the "software crisis" ended decades ago. The division you propose already exists. The "component creators" are called "programmers". The "component assemblers" are called "users". That's why you can use, say, Google Docs Forms to slap together a signup form in ten minutes that would have taken you a couple of hours in PHP with MySQL in 2000.
  • redwood 14y ago
    I think you're spot on. Just as the personal computer and GUI brought "computing" to the masses for their use and massive scale return on investment, we need to see the equivalent innovation in programming components. In other words just as it's now easier than ever to edit movies, write a paper, polish a photo: we need to see this ease of interface brought to programming. I know hard core CS types will say that making programming easy for the masses will mean it won't be fast, it won't allow for the optimal algorithms. However computing speed and bandwidth is rising exponentially and countless applications for software do not need to be as optimal as possible. In the future people who are not programmers but who are one step removed (e.g. okay with spreadsheets, SQL, some basic scripting when needed, visual programming like Labview, and who understand software architecture) will need to be able to do more complex things with computers, things that today only programmers can do. We need to see the separation between programmer and the technical creative masses disappear a bit. Or at least as tablatom says, there has to be room for two types: those who build the tools for easy programming and those who do easy programming.
• fauigerzigerk 14y ago
  I think he's got the hand-made idea wrong. Programs are machines. Writing software is the act of specifying how those machines work. I don't know any industry in which this is done by other machines. It's always manual work. The work of a financial analyst is also entirely manual by the way.
• rumcajz 14y ago
  How is the code hand-made? The millions of gmail users are using the same piece of code. Same thing with Windows users. That's what you call mass production.
  • fsniper 14y ago
    I think this is looking backwards. Who uses an item is not related to it's producing methods. Say a handmade sword can be used by different swordsmen in generations. And this would not make it mass produced.
• bigiain 14y ago
  My opinion? Because as much as the software industry loves to adopt the work "engineer", almost none of the sort of websites and software discussed here on HN ever gets anything much like "engineering" in the sense of, say, "civil engineering" done. I think in my ~20year career, I've had only 3 projects that were specified well enough up front that we just "built it according to the plans" and had a satisfied customer at the end. Overwhelmingy, some (or most) of the design gets "made up as we go along". Even on projects with several small forests worth of up-front documentation, there's almost always large areas of vagueness or outright contradictory requirements, which need decision making on the developers part halfway into the job. There are _very_ few websites that couldn't be coded from the ground up in a few weeks with a few good programmers - _IF_ you had already thought through all of the things the site needs and all of the consequences and the contradictions in those consequences. Even the big ugly complex projects, like Google's search or Facebook or Wikipedia or Twitter - if you had a spec that answered all the details about how you wanted them, a small team of experienced web guys could get it up and running in a month or so, and let you now how much cloud/hardware/sysadmin/support you'd need to budget for as your customer acquisition kicked in. It doesn't take very long to "build" the software or the website (obvious "large scale" projects like OSes excepted). What takes most of the time is identifying and solving the problem. (And, I suspect a lot of the reason software/websites have a reputation for taking "so long" is that they're _way_ too often rushed into the "building" phase way before all the things that need designing are even identified, then all the new solutions take longer 'cause we try to fit them around all the work that's already been done.)
  • jurre 14y ago
    I think you might be underestimating how much custom code has been written by companies like twitter and Facebook, think php to c++ compilers, databases, rpc servers, log frameworks etc etc. even if all of the designs of all of that software was given upfront I doubt any small team could build it within a month or so.
    • bigiain 14y ago
      I'll admit I'm exaggerating for effect, but… If the design and spec job was done with full knowledge of current state-of-the-art "web frameworks, databases, rpc servers, log frameworks, etc etc." - and requirements adjusted to suit "off the shelf" tested and reliable code, only speccing "custom code" where absolutely necessary, I think my claim is still supportable. I don't want a spec that says "you need to write this in php - therefore you need to write a php compiler to scale it". I want those problems solved by the spec. The "coders" just want APIs and datastructures and wireframes and finalised graphic design and content/content-inventory. I reckon I know people who could do it.
• fierarul 14y ago
  Nothing is made entirely by machines. At some point it's made by hand. The thing is software is a bit like doing clay pottery when it's not properly done. Once you add a bit of a systematic approach to it and you test is, review it, it becomes a bit closer to an industrial product. The thing is the rest of the world is also in a state of flux. Plumbers changed materials quite a few times in the past decade which changed the fixtures a bit. So the concept is the same (ie. design patterns) but the actual material and its characteristics changed (ie. framework, programming languages) and there are different ways to put them together: welding, glue, etc (ie. APIs). But changing some material, fixtures and binding material doesn't even compare to the kind of flexibility we have with software! The solution for plumbers is that they always use what's current. Which makes their field as much of a fashion-driven field as ours (think about it). But give them an existing house with multi-layer pipes and tell them to fix it and they will also comment that it's old tech and you should switch to copper or whatever. In conclusion, I don't see how software is any different than other fields except that we are much more flexible and go with a much greater speed. Software is at its infancy because science in general is at its infancy.
• swecker 14y ago
  I think of software development more as an art than a science. If those questions were asked of a professional painter I think we would hear similar responses. It's all by hand, colors shapes and textures can be amazingly complex in their combinations, standards would only inhibit a true artist, and a painter usually has no idea at all when a masterpiece might come forth. So my answer to "Why is is so hard?" would be, "because it's art." And "why do we keep doing it?" "Cause we're artists, and people enjoy art."
  • apl 14y ago
    That's outrageous self-glorification and utterly misleading. Software development qualifies as much as an art as other forms of engineering and most crafts do -- somewhat, at the highest levels, but generally not. Don't justify the shortcomings of current software engineering by nebulously labeling it a form of art.
    • swecker 14y ago
      I don't consider any of those things as shortcomings, simply aspects of anything involving human minds using a creative process. You're right that it's the same as all other forms of engineering, but I would also consider most of that art as well. With that I mostly just mean; despite the laws/science/logic involved, creating something new is usually a creative process.
• ExpiredLink 14y ago
  Is it? > meta name="generator" content="WordPress 3.0.1" Was it hard to create this blog entry? Obviously he has a point but, in general, the abundance of predefined frameworks and libraries makes it easier to create "web sites and software". Fortunately for us (developers) at the same time user demands grow higher and higher. Web-Sites 'need' to become more dynamic, styled, responsive, ... simple CRUD 'needs' to turn into a 3-trier distributed middleware architecture. tl;dr software complexity is a constant. Progress in easing development is compensated by increasing demands.
  • davedx 14y ago
    I think that's a tautology. In my professional experience (I started programming 20 years ago and worked on my first 'enterprise' Java project 12 or so ago), software complexity has become much greater. If you look at just the different areas you need to be proficient in now to build 'enterprise' software compared to 20 years ago, it's insane. What I think has happened is that experienced developers have constantly had to keep up with learning to account for this. I don't think complexity has stayed constant - we have expanded our skill set and knowledge to keep up.
    • ExpiredLink 14y ago
      > software complexity has become much greater I'm not sure if your memory serves you well. Anyway, the human mind is limited wrt complexity. It cannot grow infinitely. Also, complexity shifted from languages (e.g. C++) to frameworks and tools (e.g. JEE).
  • robryan 14y ago
    I'm not sure if it is just my programmers mentality but I haven't been able to even run a company blog on Wordpress without coming across a few things I can improve. I have seen people put together a Wordpress with nothing more than addons and some basic HTML knowledge and it is pretty impressive what can be done, I think it is far from a tool anyone can pickup and make whatever blog type site they need without knowing about a ton of technologies.
• Swizec 14y ago
  Building software is often compared to building houses. If civil engineers can design and create a very complex bridge or dam or whatever, and it keeps working for 150 years without breaking. Why can't us software engineers make software that will work without bugs for more than 10 minutes? Problem is, the two aren't really comparable. A while ago someone wrote an article that we are Software Gardeners not engineers[1]. And I think that comparison is much more apt. Software is maleable, it can change, the layers of complexity build up so high it's impossible for any one person, or team of persons, to fully understand. Even the mathematical theory of software isn't fully understood yet, and yet we are piling those little lacks of understanding on every layer of the architecture ... they add up and things become monstrous. BUT! This is a good thing. Software isn't a physical object. I want to be able to change the specs half way through a project rather than having to wait another 50 years to design a better bridge. This makes progress quicker. As always, when progress is quick (and easy), it is also messy. For example: it took builders thousands of years to invent The Arch and trully revolutionize the industry. It took software only a couple of decades to go from machine code to python. Oh and never forget, the Turing Machine was "invented" in 1948. Our lives revolve around an industry the theoretic principles of which were first defined less than 70 years ago. [1] http://chrisaitchison.com/2011/05/03/you-are-not-a-software-engineer http://chrisaitchison.com/2011/05/03/you-are-not-a-software-...
  • ExpiredLink 14y ago
    Writing software is like writing books: http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=255898 http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=255898
• evoxed 14y ago
  > To boot, when constructing buildings, the methods are so well known that one person can design (the architect) and another person can build (the carpenter, plumber, electrician) As an architect... easier said than done.
• dools 14y ago
  I was toying with the analogy of "building things" vs. "building software" the other day. I've always felt that comparing software with architecture, building a car etc. is what people naturally reach for since it's something they're familiar with in the physical world and much of the same terminology is used. I don't think that software is at that point, though. Physical things "play nice" together because they are part of the physical world. Materials have characteristics that are inherent and don't need to be conceived of where as the way things behave and interact in software needs to be defined and constructed entirely by humans. I guess one could argue that happens to a certain extent in the world of materials science but ... I don't really think it holds up. I arrived at a point where I started to think of building software as writing a novel. Once you start to use that as an analogy, it doesn't seem so weird that it's hard and takes ages, because so does writing a novel. In a novel, one must define the entire world, and one can make the choice of using/re-using story lines or doing something original. People that trot out formulaic drivel make better money than the tortured geniuses on average, but the few tortured geniuses that manage to hit, hit it big and serve as an example to all the others. I kind of stopped thinking about it at this point and got back to work, but I think that using that analogy, things really start to make more sense ... what do you reckon?
• teyc 14y ago
  I wonder what changes we might see if we insisted on teaching programming in the large upfront. For instance, instead of teaching 'public static void main,' we taught people about component oriented programming. This way, people are equipped with an understanding of the complexity involved. I also wonder whether teaching practitioners to diagnose and identify what type of project one is dealing with might avoid blind spots when estimating projects. For instance, an LDAP project should be identified as an integration project, where one might have to deal with unexpected schema. The real problem with software projects at the moment is we lack a proper framework to think about the nature of each project and therefore don't understand where the risks are, and properly advise clients.
• trustfundbaby 14y ago
  brilliant comment in the original post, just in case anybody missed it "When I had my bathroom remodelled, at first I thought it was organized amazingly well and why couldn’t software be like that? There was a designer from Expo, a primary contractor and subcontractors for tiling, painting, etc. a project workbook containing all the documents, including the design, and a logbook for every contractor to record their visit. But it turned out to be just like a software project. As soon as they started ripping up the walls, the painstakingly drawn design for the tub/shower was hastily and arbitrarily adjusted because the casing for an outside fire extinguisher was in the way. Many of the components turned out to be incompatible with each other and many were not the ones originally ordered (the bathtub was not even the one labelled on its box!) Communication was terrible – the city inspector would tell the primary contractor to change something, and then a subcontractor would show up and ask me what he was supposed to do. When there was a disagreement about whether the tiling was done properly, one of the contractors disfigured the tiling to force another contractor to redo it. They all had other projects, so for long stretches I had a pile of dirt (for the cement) in my patio and a non-functioning bathroom for months. And toward the end there were some quick patches, e.g. the walls were slightly curved so edges of the tiles looked bad and they just painted the patches, which worked but cost me extra. And a couple of years later when the tub sprung a leak, the plumber couldn’t figure out how to get in there, said they must have done a shoddy job on connecting the pipes, then when he finally got a good look at it, realized why they did it that way. It was exactly like a software project!"
  • astrodust 14y ago
    I spent half a year doing home renovation as a way to get out of software development and into something totally unrelated only to find out the two are exactly the same thing. The tools are different, but the problems and the way you go about solving them are freakishly identical. You wonder why buildings take so long to construct? It's because nothing goes as you expect. As they say: A plan is just a list of things that don't happen.
  • jameshart 14y ago
    There's a big difference between a construction project and a software project, though. With no formal plumbing experience, a layman can walk into a newly installed bathroom and can tell, for example, whether it has any large holes in the walls; whether the materials used in the construction seem solid; whether, when the toilet is flushed, the waste actually appears to go away into the sewage system; whether the contractor got carried away and installed an industrial air extraction unit when all that was needed was a small vent fan. When you go in to inspect a software system someone has constructed for you, though, you just don't know. It could have a gaping security hole; it may be dreadfully underpowered for your needs - or ridiculously overpowered. And you just can't tell. And while, if you need repairs on your bathroom, you can get in any plumber and, even though he may criticise the original installer's technique, he can pretty reliably open things up and expect to find things he understands - pipes, for example, rather than, say a system of motorized buckets. But if you get in someone to look at software you've had built then who knows what the original developer will have constructed. And as a customer of a bathroom installer, you can (hopefully) understand why you can't just have the showerhead suspended in midair with no pipes to feed it; that you can't have an electrical outlet installed actually in the bathtub; that the bathroom is only 8 by 12 so there isn't room to include a hottub. But no such immediate understanding is available to someone commissioning software. The physicality of real things renders them much more readily comprehended by the user, which means they have a chance to grasp what goes into creating them. But software's complete lack of physical existence means that it is virtually impossible for anyone except its creators to fully comprehend.
• eaurouge 14y ago
  This may be somewhat controversial to say on HN, but writing software isn't as hard as this post makes it out to be. Yes, there are disciplines in computer science that require a lot of effort, dedication and smarts to master, but the actual task of writing software isn't that hard. It can be frustrating, but I won't describe it as "so hard". After all, you're really just describing to a machine, the idea(s), design or algorithm(s) you need it to implement. And we have languages, tools, processes, practices (etc) to make this task easier. Yes, it can get frustrating at times but a lot of other professions can be just as frustrating. By the way, if you think building websites is hard, you should try writing code to run on some electro-mechanical system, like a robot.
• roel_v 14y ago
  "How often do you think two plumbers argue over the right way to plumb a bathroom? Almost never!" I don't think this guy has ever been to a construction site. The people who work for me argue about stuff like this all the goddamn time. About the most minute details like making a connection from a wall point to the drain going first straight then left, or first left then straight, and a million other things that are completely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. So just like software. They also come up with the same justifications for doing it one way or another - 'oh but it'll be easier later on' (programming language nerd wars), 'this way saves work', 'this way is more robust'. Get 10 of them together and you get 11 opinions. And you know what - in the end, the best ones are the ones who don't come up with different solutions every single time, but who just get stuff done, good enough, in time and within spec. Just like software.
  • kamaal 14y ago
    >>the best ones are the ones who don't come up with different solutions every single time, but who just get stuff done, good enough, in time and within spec. Just like software. This looks like some who uses Dynamic/scripting languages to get the job done, like Perl. Especially 'get stuff done', 'different solutions every single time'(TIMTOWDI), 'Good enough' seem to perfectly match that definition.
    • roel_v 14y ago
      Eh, no, exactly the opposite - what I meant was, the people I prefer are the ones who don't decide on tech first, then fit the solution to the actual problem withing the constraints of that tech. People who get the job done don't care all that much about one type of pipe vs the other or what have you (I don't know anything about plumbing really), or if they should use Perl of C++. They use what fits the problem, and don't fret endlessly about the tools, they just use those tools to get results.
• cateye 14y ago
  The important question that needs to be distinguished is: How much R&D is involved in your project? It doesn't matter if it is a software project or a physical project. If the percentage of unknown terrain is high, the project will become complex. When a very progressive and innovative bridge/house needs to be build with new materials and a unknown construction etc., the project will be complex and you can't design it (completely) upfront. For example, if your software project is just a CRUD application (without complex business logic), a qualified and experienced software developer can estimate it and deliver it on time. (There are a lot of frame works and tools already available for this kind of software. So, nobody doesn't need to reinvent the wheel.) If the wheel is not invented yet for your problem, yes, it can take a while and your luck is in the hand of gods. The other issue is that there are a lot of developers that can't get working any shit. But incompetent people are everywhere.
  • kragen 14y ago
    It does matter if it's a software project, because any work you're doing on a software project that isn't R&D is wasted time that you should figure out how to automate. That's not the case if you're building a bridge or a house. Yet. Robots will get a lot better this decade.
• dgregd 14y ago
  I would love to get software to visualize source code as 3d structures. As a main purpose to see its complexity, not to read or understand source code. And then put on one picture, side by side with proper scale, my system and a stadium.
• scotty79 14y ago
  You know what would make my day as webdeveloper? 1. Language that doesn't require me to connect to the external system and use new brain-dead language to do such basic thing as persisting and efficiently accessing data. How do you declare persistent array of objects that you will be wanting to access by some of their properties in your favourite language without keeping the whole thing in RAM? I'd love to have my data stored in XML if I could query it without loading the whole file into memory and if I could hint it what XPaths I'll be accessing in the future so it can create some indexes to make those accesses faster. 2. Tool that I could use to convert photoshop design to sane subset of HTML and CSS and perhaps JavaScript without manually writing text documents all by hand. Dreamweaver is just set of buttons to click to insert tags and that's not what I mean. I think of something more like a GUI designer where I could load psd, or multiple psd-s and use them as a blueprint and source of bitmaps while creating a webpage. In MS Visual Studio GUI designer has a nice thing called Anchor. It allows you to anchor borders of your component at fixed distances from borders of it's parents. If people who defined HTML standards embraced that ideas then webdevelopment of recent 10 years would be flowers and bunnies instead of franticly searching how to make the browsers actually fill the height of the parent when you say "height: 100%" (hint: you can't). 3. Tool that could present me with graphical view of what components my webapp consists of and how they are connected. Something like database diagrams but for living breathing components. It's really tiring to making sense of what your app actually does just by looking through a small hole of the size of letters in the debugger and stack trace. 4. I'd like to see, while inspecting a method, all the places in my code where this method is surely called from and all the places this method might be called from (because of inheritance, function pointers, dynamic calls etc.). Function call is the connection between component. It's really nasty that when looking at source point of the connection then you can see the destination but when looking at destination you have no idea what are the source points. What webdevelopment lacks in my opinion are just proper (visual) tools to deal with its complexity and inconveniences. Decade or two of this crap and you really are fed up because there are less and less interesting problems to solve and same drudgery over and over. Standard component interfaces would also be nice but unless you have a generally adopted tool that favours some standard there won't be any standard. Current state of the art web-development tool is text editor with syntax highlighting and auto-complete broken to various degrees. The only thing it favours is not keeping HTML, JavaScript and CSS inside strings because then it refuses to highlight it. It does the same thing about SQL but that really doesn't bother people enough because SQL is already lost cause.
• idleloops 14y ago
  Most sites could use pre-made systems with a minor amount of look and feel tweaks. So I think a lot of it comes down to sales/con men and snobbery. And possibly programmers getting lost down rabbit holes.
• betageek 14y ago
  On a fundamental level the tools we have to build software are still pretty bad. If that wasn't true we wouldn't be seeing the massive increase in languages & frameworks that try to take the pain away. It just takes time to make an entire industry work smoothly and software engineering is still a young discipline. When I look round at the innovation going on lately - the rise of alternate JVM languages, increased expressiveness in languages like Ruby, frameworks like Rails, Django, Bootstrap, Less & SASS, compile-to-JS projects like CoffeeScript & ClojureScript, renewed interest in visual programming ideas like LightTable and many more, it seems we've put our foot on the gas again. I'm pretty optimistic the programming tools of tomorrow will fix the day-to-day annoyances, leaving us more time to concentrate on the core problems.
• b1daly 14y ago
  A lot of good points, just a couple I thought of: Software is written to control hardware. In the end that's all a user can use. Computers are a new category of machine, they are super complex, easily reconfigurable general purpose machines. So writing softare doesn't really compare with other trades. In some sense it's like a design, but since the machine is already constructed the building of the particular machine that is the app in practice is trivial (usually, click install). If you compare to building a house,let's say the program is like the complete design. One could design a house that was reused over and over. In some degree this happens (prefab houses). But since the construction costs are high relative to the design, there is usually some room and incentive to customize, just a bit. For a software app, if it's well written, the end product builds itself. The cost of this last step is virtually nothing. Since the design can be used repeatedly, the software development costs can be spread over a lot of end users. For example, take Excel. A "spreadsheet machine" is pretty useful, it's complicated. You could compare "spreadsheet machine" to a house (or maybe something like a tractor). Aside from tweaking, the software is done, the actual machine (a PC) is a commodity. It's a done deal, anyone who wants a "spreadsheet machine" can get one relatively cheaply. But now, since the machines are out there, along with a huge amount of cheaply distributed software (the OS,languages, compilers) everyone is tempted to make something new. How about a multimedia playback machine? Brand new things that haven't even been made before. Even though there are a bunch of general purpose tools available, it is the "newness" of the app that makes it hard to predict how long it will take to code. New problems don't have existing solutions, so no one can predict how long it will take to find them. Also, since the actual machine is super complex, which is necessary for such a general purpose device, there is looseness in the designs, leading to many different ways of doing the same thing and inevitable bugs. There are bugs in the OS, so you are going to have bugs in your app. Think about how much more complex a PC Playing back a DVD is compared to a DVD player.
• mgkimsal 14y ago
  Quite an aside, but... I see many things going wrong with processes in businesses all the time. Simple processes - things like following up with me on an inquiry that I made, or correcting an invoice and sending it to me. And those get borked constantly. And almost inevitably, I get something like "oh sorry, our computers were down" or "oh, the computer made a mistake". Hrm... But with software development we are in charge of the computer. When there's a problem with the computer, there's no ability to shrug it off or make excuses - it's our entire purpose on a project is to make the computer do stuff. Oh, no doubt we can (and do!) make excuses - the compiler versions are wrong, the tool doesn't work with this other platform, etc... but no one outside our field can even understand those problems, nor do they want to. It's just our fault, and we have to fix it.
• jakeonthemove 14y ago
  Because software is nowhere near as mature as machines - give it a few decades and the process will be very automated, for sure. Even now you can build simple apps with drag-n-drop, and you can make your computer do anything you want using automation tools like Automate/WinAutomation. Also, the whole post is a big subscribe link for me when NoScript is enabled (pretty smart, actually, if it's not a bug).
• peterwwillis 14y ago
  You know, it's really easy to build a car. All you need is wheels, brakes, a frame, a power source, a transmission, some fuel, and some crap to connect the power to the transmission to the wheels and the wheels to the frame. And a seat. Oh, and a steering wheel. Boom. Done. You can hand-build a car by yourself over a couple days. I mean sure, the engine, transmission, frame, wheels, tires, seat, gas tank, carburetor, brakes, etc are all manufactured by hundreds of people and dozens of companies to get you to that point. But basically, you decide what components to use and how to put them together. It takes you a relatively minute amount of time to assemble them and it's much easier than trying to manufacture all the parts yourself. Somehow, after building cars for over 200 years, both hobbyists and huge corporations find new ways to build them (and seem to enjoy themselves). They even come out with new ones every couple years and keep finding people to buy them. You'd think the general public would wise up to the fact that it's all the same thing over and over and demand our jetson cars already.
  • RowanH 14y ago
    Interesting analogy.. I'll take it a little further in the custom/kit car world, it's not unlike the software world. The last 20% takes 80% of the effort, and you can clearly tell the projects that have had thousands of hours put in with attention to detail versus those that haven't. And, not unlike software you can see as a builder where you came from as your craft matures. Looking at a rolling chassis Lotus Super 7 replica I started building 15 years ago, is not unlike my first SaxBasic (VBA) script I wrote not far around the same timeframe. Fast forward 15 years later and it's like really, what was I thinking ? Contrary to brogrammer theory, this stuff is hard, and takes a lot of years of experience and breadth of knowledge to do well.
• Bxstraz 14y ago
  Cuz you're a frickin' amateur? It's not rocket science, it's easy to do, but it is work! I think these meatheads are complaining because it's work...
• agentultra 14y ago
  I don't really find software development difficult. When you're developing applications be they web applications or some sort of enterprise widget, the majority of the work is connecting libraries together. Most of the difficulty is in dealing with the incongruities of the various APIs. As long as there is a good process in place I've found little trouble in delivering and estimating software. As in the construction of any artifact by human means there will be bumps in the road. No amount of technology we can use today will solve that issue. It's a matter of communication and flexibility. One might speculate that great buildings such as the Eiffel Tower or the Empire State Building weren't so perfectly specified as to allow the construction workers to simply, "put the pieces together." Problems certainly arise and must be dealt with accordingly. Software is no different. We still write programs that guide fighter jets to land on a tiny boat in the middle of the ocean. We've written programs that drive robots across the martian surface. And we also write programs that share our inane thoughts and activities with our friends, family, and random interested strangers. The degrees of failure are still the same and for the most part assessed accordingly: while Twitter will strive for 100% up time there is little money or life lost when it does go down. Whereas when a martian robot plummets into the side of the planet it's a big loss (and has happened). Mistakes are made in engineering. Unanticipated side-effects arise. And we do our best to deal with them as well as we can. What distinguishes software from contemporary engineering? A couple hundred years of development at the very least. I'd say we've come a long way and have some ways to go. But if you stick with it you might find it.
• kpennell 14y ago
  I worked in an oil refinery for about a half year (turnarounds). Turnarounds involved shutting down one part of the refinery for rebuilding and repairs. A lot of the work involved pipe welding. Pipe welding pays extremely well (for a trade) and that's because it requires such consistently high performance. As a pipe welder, you have to stamp your name into every weld you do. If your weld fails, it could kill people. They check pipe welds using an xray. If a guy's weld failed xray more than once(and usually more than 0 times), he was out of the job.
• njonsson 14y ago
  Plus, in the history of the world, he said, is there one thing you can think of that has been hand-made, and on such a large scale as software, that was as complex? [I cannot not.] Yes: musical compositions. The largest software projects are more complex, and take longer to complete, than symphonies. But the failure rate is probably comparable. There are probably plenty of commercial composers who write music mostly because it’s a job they can do, and they derive a modicum of satisfaction from it. But the composers who have made history — just like the programmers who have made history — do it because they must. If they give it up, they cease to do what they were made to do.
• gcb 14y ago
  It's all because developers think they are entitled to interesting problems and amazing coding. Heck, in my day job i even have to fight to learn my damn goal. Which never is "to code" something. That's always only the means to the end. But still, every Coworker and manager start stating that as the ultimate goal of an engineer in a software department.
• peejaybee 14y ago
  I think Joel Spolsky had a nice spin on this a few years back: "Once you've written a subroutine, you can call it as often as you want. This means that almost everything we do as software developers is something that has never been done before. This is very different than what construction workers do. Herman the Handyman, who just installed a tile floor for me, has probably installed hundreds of tile floors. He has to keep installing tile floors again and again as long as new tile floors are needed. We in the software industry would have long since written a Tile Floor Template Library (TFTL) and generating new tile floors would be trivial." http://www.joelonsoftware.com/news/fog0000000337.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/news/fog0000000337.html
• goldmab 14y ago
  I call bullshit. If this guy was bored because all of his software projects were exactly the same, he should have automated their creation and reused his code so that they took an extremely short amount of time to create. Anyone who can't do that is either encountering novel problems that require decisions, or just not a good enough programmer to automate and reuse. This is the same way I feel when programmers complain about writing "just another CRUD app." CRUD apps are in fact very difficult to write because of usability concerns. If all of your "create" screens look exactly the same no matter what is being created, that means you are making no effort as a UI designer to anticipate common creation patterns. Even assuming a cookie-cutter UI, a CRUD programmer has to properly model the concepts in data, which is not trivial either.
  • sreyaNotfilc 14y ago
    I was thinking the same thing. I'm relatively new to professional programming, but I do create tools and code snippets that solves/facilitates problems that commonly exists. Isn't that the main function of creating software and using libraries? Code reuse was one of the things that my professors constantly advocated when I was in college.
• joedev 14y ago
  This article points out the issues I have with the "software craftsmanship" movement. By definition, crafting is building by hand. When we treat software development as a "craft", we attribute too much benefit to hand-building software and lend little effort to finding ways to be more productive and efficient at software development. As long as software is considered a craft, it will always be an expensive, laborious, and frustrating process for clients and customers. That may be great for software developers' egos and pocketbooks, but does little to improve the image of software development projects among the general public.
• ericson578 14y ago
  Those are all legitimate problems with our industry. But instead of quitting, I'd prefer to try and solve them.
• jff 14y ago
  Is it standard/acceptable procedure to make every word in your article link to a subscription page?
• knieveltech 14y ago
  I am compelled to pick the following nits: "Stuff that is made by hand is hard to make, and even more hard to make well, and tends to be less sturdy than things made by machines." The last portion of this statement is inaccurate. Hand tools (for example) benefit in terms of usability, durability and quality when hand-made. This is why top end cutlery, wood carving chisels, etc. are typically forged by hand. This also typically applies to furniture. "How often do you think two plumbers argue over the right way to plumb a bathroom?  Almost never!" Also inaccurate. Clearly the author has never worked in the trades. "Finally, can you think of any job where people are making really complex things by hand, and which requires a ton of experience and training to be good at, yet everyone and their uncle has an opinion on how long a project should take to get done?" Pick any form of construction known to man. Budget overruns, issues with building plans, and problems with materials crop up constantly, even with modern building materials and best practices.
• efa 14y ago
  The article mentions that the customer always thinks it should be done faster or cheaper. I often have the opposite experience. The customer who is completely clueless and has no idea how long things take. I've had customers ask for a link to something and ask if that would be really hard to do. I think it would be really easy for a disreputable programmer to take advantage (and I'm sure many do) of these people.