Fighting Complexity in Software Development • Hacker News Board

Re: Fighting Complexity in Software Development

#21

Post by UK-AL » Fri, Jul 05, 2019, 12:44 AM UTC

redact207 wrote: post #9

I really love the concepts provided by Domain Driven Design (DDD), regardless if you choose OOP or FP to implement it with. It's fine if you want to choose C#, and there're better ways of addressing the approaches to validation in OOP than were provided in the examples. Value objects are a nice way to ensure strong immutable types like credit cards can be created and passed around without requiring separate validatio…

I find doing things like having types that flow through different stages -> UnvalidatedEmail, ValidatedEmail, VerifiedEmail is a lot better in f#.

In c# you need to create a lot of value object classes for that. Or have some kind of property inside the value object which indicates current state of the email.

Even then you won't be able to exhaustive pattern matching on it to guarantee each situation is handled.

Re: Fighting Complexity in Software Development

#22

Post by codr7 » Fri, Jul 05, 2019, 12:50 AM UTC

Aeolun wrote: post #13

I feel like I’ve responded this before, but I feel like people often attribute their increased knowledge of how to develop systems without bugs to the new fancy language they switched to. Fact is they could build better software in the old language as well, assuming they started from scratch.

Which is a longish way of giving the answer no one wants to hear: Experience is everything.

Re: Fighting Complexity in Software Development

#23

Post by jumpinalake » Fri, Jul 05, 2019, 12:57 AM UTC

jes5199 wrote: post #17

Chyzwar wrote: post #8

In mature OOP you have ways to write nice models and have good validations. https://guides.rubyonrails.org/active_record_validations.htm... I will argue that the complexity of software development is not because of OOP vs Functional. Tooling, documentation, quality of libraries and people are what matter most. Ruby was a massive success is largely attributed to above. We are humans, we can understand and deal with a…

but have you ever had to maintain a ruby project after the first year? The cost just goes up and up, and I think it’s because the language is so hostile to static analysis.

Couldn’t agree more. I was part of a $30 million Rails project that got unmanageable and burned after 2-3 years. Golang is so much more forgiving to human error.

Re: Fighting Complexity in Software Development

#24

Post by lsd5you » Fri, Jul 05, 2019, 12:58 AM UTC

jes5199 wrote: post #17

Chyzwar wrote: post #8

In mature OOP you have ways to write nice models and have good validations. https://guides.rubyonrails.org/active_record_validations.htm... I will argue that the complexity of software development is not because of OOP vs Functional. Tooling, documentation, quality of libraries and people are what matter most. Ruby was a massive success is largely attributed to above. We are humans, we can understand and deal with a…

but have you ever had to maintain a ruby project after the first year? The cost just goes up and up, and I think it’s because the language is so hostile to static analysis.

And probably also the non-local effects of using a framework - and a fairly magic one at that. All the effects of which are understood when creating the functionality, but the maintainer (even when it is the author) has a much harder time with probably only a partial understanding with certain things being out of mind.

Re: Fighting Complexity in Software Development

#25

Post by flukus » Fri, Jul 05, 2019, 12:58 AM UTC

I'm sure this is partly because I don't read F#, but it looks like they've moved all the complexity into meta-programming madness, this is just being way to clever to play code golf at a high level, this is exactly the sort of complexity we should be fighting against.

Even the initial c# version was over complicated. The complex fluent interface with lambdas and callbacks could be done with a few if statements that would be simpler, faster and require no knowledge of the FluentValidation library. Unnecessary getters and setters to satisfy the encapsulation gods.

If you want to fight complexity got back to basics, you can have a static method returning a validation result with code like this:

  if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(card.CardNumber) && CardNumberRegex.IsMatch(card.CardNumber))
    validations.add("Oh my");

Converting if statements to more elaborate constructs is creating complexity not fighting it.

Re: Fighting Complexity in Software Development

#26

Post by jumpinalake » Fri, Jul 05, 2019, 12:59 AM UTC

codr7 wrote: post #22

Aeolun wrote: post #13

I feel like I’ve responded this before, but I feel like people often attribute their increased knowledge of how to develop systems without bugs to the new fancy language they switched to. Fact is they could build better software in the old language as well, assuming they started from scratch.

Which is a longish way of giving the answer no one wants to hear: Experience is everything.

Are you arguing that all tools are equal? Or that some tools are better than others but the difference is negligible compared to experience? I don’t agree that experience is everything (if by everything you mean that all other factors have zero influence).

Re: Fighting Complexity in Software Development

#27

Post by lsd5you » Fri, Jul 05, 2019, 1:00 AM UTC

codr7 wrote: post #22

Aeolun wrote: post #13

I feel like I’ve responded this before, but I feel like people often attribute their increased knowledge of how to develop systems without bugs to the new fancy language they switched to. Fact is they could build better software in the old language as well, assuming they started from scratch.

Which is a longish way of giving the answer no one wants to hear: Experience is everything.

Erm surely ability is important as well. Programming is no different in this regard to pro sports - some people have more talent (which probably in turn breaks down into innate attributes, determination and learning opportunity earlier in life).

Re: Fighting Complexity in Software Development

#28

Post by cottsak » Fri, Jul 05, 2019, 1:01 AM UTC

Chyzwar wrote: post #8

In mature OOP you have ways to write nice models and have good validations. https://guides.rubyonrails.org/active_record_validations.htm... I will argue that the complexity of software development is not because of OOP vs Functional. Tooling, documentation, quality of libraries and people are what matter most. Ruby was a massive success is largely attributed to above. We are humans, we can understand and deal with a…

Agree. You can write terse, maintainable, well encapsulated, testable and readable code in most any language. The problem is about the humans not the language they select.

But yes, complexity is also a major problem.

Re: Fighting Complexity in Software Development

#29

Post by mixedCase » Fri, Jul 05, 2019, 1:24 AM UTC

Aeolun wrote: post #13

I feel like I’ve responded this before, but I feel like people often attribute their increased knowledge of how to develop systems without bugs to the new fancy language they switched to. Fact is they could build better software in the old language as well, assuming they started from scratch.

I can attest to this but it's definitely misleading. Some languages have features and patterns that are straightforward and easy to learn in that language, that once you've learnt you can emulate/replicate in almost every other language but only because you already know how it works, why it works and where the limits of your abstraction are.

And these abstractions will be often be overlooked or misused by developers who have not used them in languages where they're native; making them a net negative instead of an obvious benefit.

Re: Fighting Complexity in Software Development

#30

Post by codr7 » Fri, Jul 05, 2019, 1:26 AM UTC

jumpinalake wrote: post #26

codr7 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is a longish way of giving the answer no one wants to hear: Experience is everything.

Are you arguing that all tools are equal? Or that some tools are better than others but the difference is negligible compared to experience? I don’t agree that experience is everything (if by everything you mean that all other factors have zero influence).

Without experience, tools don't matter. A skilled developer will most likely write better code regardless of language/framework.

It's a repeating pattern in this society, fools with advanced gear doing what fools do best.