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Ask HN: CS papers for software architecture and design?

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Re: Ask HN: CS papers for software architecture and design?

#71

Post by OJFord »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #66
wwosik wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pretty sure 'guy' in modern American English is gender- and age-less. As in two 70 old ladies could be addressed as "you guys" too. Surprised me a lot when I was there

It depends on what region you are in. Guy in the UK I think means male as in Guy Fawkes. In the USA, Guy is often genderless except in the south where gal can be used without being very awkward. In general, you should just steer clear of the word, however, as opinions about it are diverse.

> Guy in the UK I think means male as in Guy Fawkes.

That's a name. Nobody's going to think you're only talking about men named 'Guy'. Context is king (ooor queen!) - it can certainly be either alone, or mixed.

Re: Ask HN: CS papers for software architecture and design?

#72

Post by madisonmay »

wwosik wrote: post #62
gobengo wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think good software engineers are just as much product guys (and data guys) as they are software guys. ya often times they are women too

pretty sure 'guy' in modern American English is gender- and age-less. As in two 70 old ladies could be addressed as "you guys" too. Surprised me a lot when I was there

Like most language, meaning is dependent on context. But in general it seems to be good practice to steer clear from pronouns associated with a particular gender when there are other perfectly good terms to be used (In this context, "people", "folks", or even "focused".)

Re: Ask HN: CS papers for software architecture and design?

#73

Post by madisonmay »

Clubber wrote: post #45
Maro wrote: post #44

I used to be very interested in Software Architecture, in fact I've read many of the papers cited here. When I did a startup many years ago, I committed the mistake of paying too much attention to the architecture of the software [1] I was writing, and not enough attention to the product/customer side of it. The last couple of years I've been de-emphasizing software architecture as an interest, and have been paying m…

Agreed, good architecture doesn't come into play until you need to add a lot of complex features or scale significantly. Initially architecture doesn't really mean squat. I would concentrate on making the codebase flexible, but that's about it. I've regretted making some of my software with a cool but complex architecture when I should have been focused on what the product does.

In Knuth's words: "Premature optimization is the root of all evil". Although I guess in this context, you're emphasizing that it's more valuable to solve the right problem poorly than it is to solve the wrong problem well.

Re: Ask HN: CS papers for software architecture and design?

#74

Post by Silhouette »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #66
wwosik wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pretty sure 'guy' in modern American English is gender- and age-less. As in two 70 old ladies could be addressed as "you guys" too. Surprised me a lot when I was there

It depends on what region you are in. Guy in the UK I think means male as in Guy Fawkes. In the USA, Guy is often genderless except in the south where gal can be used without being very awkward. In general, you should just steer clear of the word, however, as opinions about it are diverse.

Guy isn't necessarily male in the UK, except when used as a name and maybe in the context of "guys and girls". "Hi guys" is a common greeting here when addressing a mixed group.

Re: Ask HN: CS papers for software architecture and design?

#75

Post by DenisM »

chubot wrote: post #50
DenisM wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FRP is a constrained environment, which makes it easier to reason about. PHP is comparatively unconstrained, so when reading code you can’t make as many shortcut assumptions. Of course you could write in PHP in accordance to the rules, but subsequent maintainers, including the future you, cannot trust this self-imposed discipline. In other words, you wouldn’t argue that assembler is just fine because through vigor an…

I probably shouldn't have said PHP, since people have reactions to that language that may confuse the issue. I should have said stateless Python front ends. Not even CGI/FastCGI, but just plain HTTP front ends. Many large websites use this architecture (YouTube, Instagram, etc.) An example of something that doesn't follow the architecture is a stateful node.js or Go server. I would say that the typical web architectu…

I see what you mean. I was thinking of smaller granularity, less than an entire HTTP request. You have a good point.

Re: Ask HN: CS papers for software architecture and design?

#77

Post by ramchip »

charlysl wrote: post #21

[1] Joe Armstrong 2003. "Making reliable distributed systems in the presence of software errors" (the Erlang paper, perhaps the most famous implementation of message passing concurrency). [2] John Backus 1979. "Can programming be liberated from the von Neumann style? A functional style and its algebra of programs." (a famous case for functional programming) [3] Victor R. Basili and Albert J. Turner. 1975 "Iterative e…

+1 for "Making reliable distributed systems in the presence of software errors". It's a long read, but it has completely changed the way I approach programming.

Re: Ask HN: CS papers for software architecture and design?

#78

Post by kenver »

Maro wrote: post #44

I used to be very interested in Software Architecture, in fact I've read many of the papers cited here. When I did a startup many years ago, I committed the mistake of paying too much attention to the architecture of the software [1] I was writing, and not enough attention to the product/customer side of it. The last couple of years I've been de-emphasizing software architecture as an interest, and have been paying m…

There’s a big difference between being tunnel visioned on architecture and not getting anything done, and the very common scenario of not seeming to care at all.

Having been a contractor at many companies Im pretty sick and saddened of seeing how common it is for every layer of the product to be implemented as a global state Singleton.

Re: Ask HN: CS papers for software architecture and design?

#79

Post by Silhouette »

Maro wrote: post #44

I used to be very interested in Software Architecture, in fact I've read many of the papers cited here. When I did a startup many years ago, I committed the mistake of paying too much attention to the architecture of the software [1] I was writing, and not enough attention to the product/customer side of it. The last couple of years I've been de-emphasizing software architecture as an interest, and have been paying m…

I was lucky enough to work at Facebook for a while and got to see (and learn) a very successful working model of product development.

Facebook has been extremely successful commercially, but I think it's dangerous to read too much into how a unicorn like that develops its software, partly because there is survivorship bias at work here, and partly because the most important things Facebook has achieved have relatively little to do with software.

Facebook's golden goose is the network effect. Once it reached a critical mass of users, it was all but unstoppable. Arguably its most impressive technical feat was achieving enough scalability in its infrastructure that it could keep up with that many users and that much data. That was a remarkable success story by any standard, but while it surely has a software element, no doubt it involved much more than just code.

On the other hand, to a first approximation Facebook has had infinite resources for most of its existence. It operates in an online environment where problems can be fixed even in production. And it doesn't really do anything that is going to cause catastrophic, unfixable consequences if something does break for a while. That is a list of luxuries that few software development teams enjoy, and what works if you can make those assumptions won't necessarily be a good idea if you can't.

As you say, you do have to pay attention to other factors as well, but there are not many organisations that have as much room to manoeuvre on the software side as Facebook does.

Re: Ask HN: CS papers for software architecture and design?

#80

Post by Silhouette »

quotemstr wrote: post #70
Maro wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most of the things people know, it's covered in books like Lean Startup, etc. It's a bit like eating well and working out. We all know we should do it, but most people don't actually eat well and work out. Then, when you see somebody who does it and looks great, you ask them, "What's your secret?". But it's not a secret, it's just that most people don't do it, because it's hard :) One story: When I was at FB,…

> When I was at FB, I happen to know that a team of size S conducted X experiments in 6 months (I can't disclose the number). As it happens, I have worked in similar size teams in other companies, and there the number was ~X/20, and sometimes 0. It don't matter how good your software architecture is, if you're trying out just 1 thing instead of 20 things... I call this velocity. Exactly! FB has the most productivity…

(And before you say: no, the codebase doesn't take a quality hit. Turns out that this ceremony around writing code is just unnecessary, contrary to population opinion.)

Which part of the codebase? Facebook's back-end systems do a very impressive job given the scale involved. On the other hand, its front-end systems appear to be mediocre in most important respects. A business without Facebook's advantages that wrote a UI as slow and buggy as Facebook's main or advertiser UIs often are could be in serious trouble.

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