I can't if it's the typefaces, the interlining, the space between paragraphs or a combination of those, but that page was so unpleasant to read that I had to use Firefox's "reader view" to do it. I have no opinion whatsoever on the the text, but the presentation was so hideous that I thought it was worth mentioning.
People who disagree aren't trying to make things complex
81–90 of 162 posts
Re: People who disagree aren't trying to make things complex
#82I can't if it's the typefaces, the interlining, the space between paragraphs or a combination of those, but that page was so unpleasant to read that I had to use Firefox's "reader view" to do it. I have no opinion whatsoever on the the text, but the presentation was so hideous that I thought it was worth mentioning.
It's the negative line height—you can see by selecting multiple lines of text that the rows actually overlap each other.
Re: People who disagree aren't trying to make things complex
#83A 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 feel like most of the strife caused at work is different value judgements on things. So I've been trying to tease out truths vs value judgements. 1 + 1 will always equal 2, no one debates that. AWS offers both Postgres and MySQL, no one debates that. But which one is better, that will be informed by possibly irrational value judgements ("Postgres bit me once, never again!") I think people are irrational in terms of…
I've seen this very often. People are absolutely consumed by avoiding their previous mistakes. Sometimes those are even searched-for almost-made-up mistakes rather than real ones, like in postmortems for successful projects.
And then BIG changes are implemented in the process. Usually in the worst possible place: in the planning of the process in the first place. If a project succeeded, and finished, your adjustments towards future projects, of course, should be tiny and minimal. In practice people make sweeping changes ("level 3 testing needs to be planned in before we even make the software design" boomed the senior architect).
And yet one lesson you quickly learn in machine learning is that whilst making adjustments that are too small ... does pretty well. You can be off by a factor 10 and while sub-optimal it works (and often, the further you get the smaller the adjustments should be).
By contrast if your adjustments are 1.1x what they should be you are stuck. You will never get where you're going. Never. That's a complete failure and you should expect to do worse and worse over time with such a strategy. So a smart person should almost always err on the side of not adjusting a behavior. Certainly from one project to the next, making more than 2% adjustment is absolute lunacy. This never works in learning algorithms. Never (0.1% is the largest generally used value). That would mean that for every software engineer in your team there should be ONE day difference EVERY 2 MONTHS from one project to the next. That's 2%. Even that is an absurdly large change, far greater than wise.
But I've never even once seen a software team that doesn't start with making 20% (one day a week different) adjustments between projects. And I've seen people make much bigger changes than that, generally not with better results. And the thing they're proud of is that they avoided a previous mistake ... a mistake they solved ... often much quicker than the delays caused by the adjustments ...
Re: People who disagree aren't trying to make things complex
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
This is because people don't realise that there are two axes on the simplicity/complexity graph, not one. So they're operating on different definitions of 'simple'.
You can make the development experience simpler, and/or you can make the software simpler.
Usually a change to one will have an inverse affect on the other. Bringing in a library will almost always make dev simpler (unless the API is more complex than whatever it's abstracting, which only seems to happen in JS land), but it's also guaranteed to make your software more complex (unless it does exactly what you need with no config, and nothing more).
Re: People who disagree aren't trying to make things complex
#85A 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…
One consequence is that when trying to have rational discussions it is necessary to try to dig in to identify all of people assumptions
A coworker of mine who once worked at Symbolics used to call this, "Applied Philosophy."
Re: People who disagree aren't trying to make things complex
#86Earlier 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…
> 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. As a software engineer who calls what I do "engineering", I have to answer to physics every day. The difference is that the relative cost of everything is skewed so far out of proportion to…
The difference is that the relative cost of everything is skewed so far out of proportion to what other engineers work with that it's hard to account for the differences
Also, the industry has been pretty cavalier about measuring those costs, especially when it comes to programmer time.
Re: People who disagree aren't trying to make things complex
#87Software is art, fashion and politics.
No it's about right and wrong. That's why software is fundamentally binary.
Usually software design debates (such as this one) are not about the state of a software application right now (the 0's and 1's), but about how quickly it can change, how well it can be understood, and how amenable it is to debugging. None of those are binary concepts. Not to mention that software applications can have many states to reason about. And many (most?) applications are undecidable, and hence resistant to analytical closure.
Re: People who disagree aren't trying to make things complex
#88A 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…
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…
I think the real difference compared to other engineering is the malleability of our product and the expectation of never-ending modifications. Software is almost never "done". So we have to be concerned about maintainability in a much bigger way than other disciplines.
Re: People who disagree aren't trying to make things complex
#89A 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 t…
There is a problem with the English language. There is no commonly used neutral pronoun. The closest thing is "they" but I think some people consider that incorrect grammar or something. he/she or switch back and forth is awkward.
Re: People who disagree aren't trying to make things complex
#90Since this seems to be the place for personal views, my views, after 20 years of experience, is that people do not notice the complexity of anything that they have digested as normal. As a result doing anything other than what they are used to seems very complex to them. Whether that other thing is actually complex to a neutral third party is situation and observer dependent. I have seen this with procedural programm…
I'm pretty sure a big part of intelligence is a type of compression. Once you are familiar with certain things, your brain automatically compresses and decompresses those patterns so you don't have to deal with them consciously much. You would not notice the same amount of complexity.
Having said that, things like cyclomatic complexity do exists. Although smaller units that are simpler on their own, do mean there are more to mentally reassemble into the larger whole.