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People who disagree aren't trying to make things complex

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Re: People who disagree aren't trying to make things complex

#41

Post by genericone »

stevenjohns wrote: post #35
sonnyblarney wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's funny because I have become, and observe the exact opposite. The notion of trying to make things more complex than they need to be I find deeply problematic. Junior engineers often end up devising solutions which are in fact too complex as they try to over engineer everything. The more experience I have, the more I accept that code is complexity and cost and that it should be avoided. Always take the easy path…

> Junior engineers often end up devising solutions which are in fact too complex as they try to over engineer everything. > The more experience I have, the more I accept that code is complexity and cost and that it should be avoided. At a previous company I worked for I proposed a solution which was considered to be too "complex" by the VP R&D. So he and another "Senior" turned around and rewrote it into something mo…

Looks like the two of you have a different worldview about what 'simplicity' means.

Re: People who disagree aren't trying to make things complex

#42

Post by just_myles »

What a read. I agree, often times we overlook the obvious solution and tend to go for a more complex one. The approach should always be simple. I don't know why anyone would ever think otherwise.

If the issue is complex in nature, you can still start with a simple solution before you dig into the weeds. I swear, sometimes people just love to work extra.

Re: People who disagree aren't trying to make things complex

#43

Post by lotyrin »

taneq wrote: post #36
agsdfgsd wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except not the first one.

Good software solving an interesting problem can be art.

Got any examples? I'd love to see them.

Something that's beautiful in its problem set (doesn't, for instance, act as glue between other, poorly designed systems and thereby reflect their flaws), beautiful in its solutions (doesn't solve too much, nor too little, doesn't make too many assumptions), beautiful in its use (user experience, performance, etc.), and beautiful in its implementation (quality under the hood, no accidental complexity, properly factored, easy to understand and maintain) is quite rare for any problem with a scope larger than say "cat", and even most programs of that size make sad assumptions about things (e.g. are in languages where things are type/memory safe as a practice of the authors' diligence, not verifiable as a matter of course) or have to reflect the complexity of the OS/machines they run on for various reasons (performance, security, etc.).

Re: People who disagree aren't trying to make things complex

#44

Post by yason »

jgtrosh wrote: post #16
dmreedy wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great comment, and very succinctly put. Somewhat incidentally, but I believe this is a large part of why, to me, software development is not an engineering discipline. At the end of the day, engineers (I think; not actually being one myself) have to answer to physics. The 'possible model space' is relatively constrained, and everyone is working under, roughly, the same set of assumptions, rules, and standar…

When you're fighting for speed on your code, it ends up feeling like what you're describing of that engineering world. Your techniques have to adapt to what is actually happening in the lower layers. When you're fighting for ease of use, you can't make your users forget their preconceptions, you have to adapt to these externalities. I think sometimes engineering and software development have different degrees of free…

I think programming has more trade-offs to choose from, and thus more freedoms. You can make a program slow, fast, small, large, limited, comprehensive, quickly written for a specific case or carefully designed for the generic case, or anything else at the expense of something else.

Building a bridge doesn't have much of that: the bridge must withstand loads from the traffic, loads from the elements, material wear across decades; all that without falling down. There are aesthetical components to choose from but generally you can't avoid physics and financial cost when building one.

In programming you could choose to go with a number of alternate implementations that are as different as they would be unrealistic if only you were building a bridge instead of software. Anything from tying inflatable boats together to form a walkable chain to act as a bridge to draining all the water out and building a 6+6 lane highway across the bottom of the bay instead.

Performance is a likely domain for coming to terms with the limits of the physical qualities of computers but even then there are lots of different flavours of performance to consider, and innumerable ways to trade performance in and something else out.

Re: People who disagree aren't trying to make things complex

#45

Post by stcredzero »

ilaksh wrote: post #3

A big part of this is that programmers have different programming worldviews. Many people seem to be unaware that worldviews are not perfect rational easily modifiable constructions but are instead foundational structures that thinking builds upon automatically. Programmers are about as unlikely to easily change their programming worldviews as they are to change their political beliefs. Which is not to say that progr…

Programmers are about as unlikely to easily change their programming worldviews as they are to change their political beliefs.

Programming worldviews are political belief systems. They're just as subject to bias and groupthink. They can be just as free from empirical grounding. It's just that their context is somewhat abstracted away from the real world.

Re: People who disagree aren't trying to make things complex

#46

Post by dmreedy »

kens wrote: post #33
dmreedy wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, there's definitely a continuum as you go lower down the stack; in the same way that the first programmers were often electrical engineers (with due deference to Ada Lovelace).

Are you thinking of any early electrical engineer programmers in particular? The impression I got was that early programmers for scientific applications were largely mathematicians and scientists (e.g. Hopper, Turing, ENIAC programmers, von Neumann), while business programming was more office / business people.

Fair; I'm thinking of people like (from disparate periods) Ivan Sutherland, Doug Englebart, Claude Shannon, and so on; folks who came out of EE educations but became computer engineers or computer scientists in practice (and sort of by post-hoc definition)

Re: People who disagree aren't trying to make things complex

#47

Post by astrobe_ »

austincheney wrote: post #9

I deliberately try to make things complex, but not more complex than they actually are, though apparently this is received as a matter of perception. It commonly boils down to risk or performance versus convenience. As a senior developer I notice that juniors will sometimes do everything in their power to over-simplify a given problem. This is more often due to insecurity than accident or technical ignorance and whil…

> I deliberately try to make things complex, but not more complex than they actually are

I don't understand. Is it an elaborate way to say that you expose your juniors to the full complexity of the problem, rather than feeding them a "simplistic" view of the problem?

> This is more often due to insecurity than accident or technical ignorance and while their motives are often unintentional (non-cognitive) the actions are often exceedingly deliberate (cognitive decisions).

I don't understand. It looks like they are actually "cognitively" doing their job to me, that is they try to separate the essential complexity from the accidental complexity. They are trying to cut the Gordian knot, I don't see how this is linked to insecurity. Maybe you should simply tell them that someone already did that job and they should not second-guess them?

> Again, its all about risk or performance in the product versus the individual developer's confidence displayed as a convenience.

No, the convenience is to do as Mister Senior Developer said, as a good code monkey, so you can leave early and work on your side project.

Re: People who disagree aren't trying to make things complex

#48

Post by shuntress »

ilaksh wrote: post #3

A big part of this is that programmers have different programming worldviews. Many people seem to be unaware that worldviews are not perfect rational easily modifiable constructions but are instead foundational structures that thinking builds upon automatically. Programmers are about as unlikely to easily change their programming worldviews as they are to change their political beliefs. Which is not to say that progr…

I completely agree with your comment but since we are on the topic of worldviews and assumptions I just want to point out that women program too.

My assumption currently is that you do not switch pronouns arbitrarily and as a result were not just as likely to send "social circumstances may necessitate that she adopt a new viewpoint" when writing about an abstract individual programmer.

I know it is annoying to have this brought to attention but my world view includes the notion that small actions like this can have a profound effect at scale.

>social circumstance may necessitate that he adopt a new viewpoint

>when trying to have rational discussions it is necessary to try to dig in to identify all of people assumptions

Re: People who disagree aren't trying to make things complex

#49

Post by brabara »

barberousse wrote: post #5

This is a particularly thorny issue as a Junior Developer. There's the issue of the Junior reaching beyond their britches, but there's also the issue of Seniors being set in there ways.

As mid level developers, how can we resolve this impasse?

Re: People who disagree aren't trying to make things complex

#50

Post by [deleted] »

brabara wrote: post #6

As someone who has read Moby Dick front to back I can agree with this argument. I had a colleague once, really bright engineer but not as steadfast as I was at the time. I suggested he read this amazing novel and he instead opted for the book on tape. During a long drive he almost died from boredom. Literally! He almost fell asleep at the wheel. While he disagreed with me that manually reading the book was the optima…

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