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Minimalism – An undervalued development skill

volument.com

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Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill

#91

Post by bdheik8 »

bertr4nd wrote: post #23

I have super mixed feelings on this. Minimalism makes for a clean, easy to understand codebase, that avoids some of the performance pitfalls associated with bigness. But sometimes it’s easy to build 80% of what you need, and then massively difficult to get to 100%, and the ease of getting to 80% can lead you astray. For instance, I can write a pretty fast matrix multiplication algorithm in maybe a few dozen lines of…

I feel like this misses the point

Those projects are organized around one monolithic package of code that could be broken out into there separate libs and composed together in novel ways.

A GUI is just the set of default compositions an opinionated team felt would connect best with an abstract perfect customer in mind.

Each chunk of code could be managed then by smaller teams, and the inputs/output spec more easily understood by all.

Unix composability at scale is what the web and devops has been peddling philosophically, IMO.

Lots of people like the desktop metaphor. Personally more of a “computer is a text editor I use to compose interesting outputs”.

Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill

#92

Post by tipiirai »

neilkakkar wrote: post #7

.. This would make sense if it worked. There's a fine line between "not-developed-here syndrome" and minimalism-as-you-mention-it. If you can account for all the problems with the basic functionality the original big library tried to solve, this might work. But, if you're rediscovering all the problems again, and trying to solve them again, it's probably not the best use of your time. Further, if something is big eno…

There is indeed a fine line between NIH and minimalism. They have a strong correlation. You have to compromise between unnecessary features/bloat/crap or simply do it yourself. It's often surprising how easy it is to make something from the scratch. Hence NIH.

Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill

#94

Post by pletnes »

robmccoll wrote: post #58
anderspitman wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You bring up a good point, but I think the takeaway is that you need to be thoughtful about the process, not necessarily that one way or the other is always right. How often are breaking changes introduced to the APIs of OpenBLAS or LAPACK? I would guess approximately never (I could be wrong though. I'm actually surprised and a bit disturbed how much activity the GitHub repos are still getting). Beyond that, how much…

That activity is probably grad students and post-docs looking to publish any overall optimizations or implementations for exotic architectures they can come up with.

Some of the activities in the last decade includes significant improvements in the documentation, build and test automation. The code might have been good before, but the usability and quality of testing has improved significantly.

Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill

#96

Post by tipiirai »

LaGrange wrote: post #31

"Be minimalist and don't use third party libraries and services. Except for ours. Use ours, because we don't have two decades of cruft under our belt excuse me, we're /minimal/. The article kinda uses a language of a sentiment I share to an extent (I think most devs are far too eager to pull dependencies — avoiding NIH doesn't mean you have to pull the entire 3rd party dependency, not if you can read a paper and impl…

Yes. There is a reason commercial packages are big/bloated/complex etc. This is an opportunity for all of us.

Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill

#97

Post by tipiirai »

mnm1 wrote: post #63

Reductionist garbage. Their "minimalist" sentry clone literally does nothing as presented on the page. There must be a back end that stores errors and an interface to view them, etc. There's a reason most apps are complex: because the world is complex. Making software that does nothing and pretending it's as useful as real software in the name of fashion, "minimalism" is frankly unimpressive and uninteresting. There…

Yes. There is a backend that stores errors and an interface to view them. This article simply compares the size/complexity/feature-richness of the frontend code. Sentry UI is good and we are familiar with it. So is ours. It's just more minimalistic.

Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill

#99

Post by jzelinskie »

user_50123890 wrote: post #26
bertr4nd wrote: post #23

I have super mixed feelings on this. Minimalism makes for a clean, easy to understand codebase, that avoids some of the performance pitfalls associated with bigness. But sometimes it’s easy to build 80% of what you need, and then massively difficult to get to 100%, and the ease of getting to 80% can lead you astray. For instance, I can write a pretty fast matrix multiplication algorithm in maybe a few dozen lines of…

AKA "The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time." —Tom Cargill, Bell Labs

Is this the original version of this quote? I’ve both repeated and heard it many different ways. Most often “the first and last 80%s”.

Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill

#100

Post by volument »

echlebek wrote: post #98

If you value minimalism, then why doesn't the page load any text when Javascript is disabled?

Because JS-disabled clients are an edge case and a minimalist approach attempts to solve most cases with the least amount of code. Nevertheless, we will make our site work with JS disabled. Thanks!
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