That's an egregiously baity title. That's not cool here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: The submitted title was "Your source code is worthless". I've changed it now.
Peter Naur's view of programming
71–80 of 198 posts
Re: Peter Naur's view of programming
#72The problem with saying it's about developers building up theory is that we all tend to forget quite a bit. Code tends to contain a ton of fixes, versioning details, or algorithmic tricks no one remembers.
I've certainly rebuilt something from scratch only to immediately stub my toe.
Re: Peter Naur's view of programming
#73That's an egregiously baity title. That's not cool here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: The submitted title was "Your source code is worthless". I've changed it now.
It's baity because it's true.
Re: Peter Naur's view of programming
#74Re: Peter Naur's view of programming
#75The article is great, though a more accurate (but admittedly less thrilling) title would have been "Poorly Documented Source Code Is Virtually Worthless". Good source code includes level of intent comments, it explains the reasoning behind decisions (especially the tradeoffs that were made) and warns future readers of potential pitfalls. In both a professional setting as well as when wanting to contribute to a favori…
> "Poorly Documented Source Code Is Virtually Worthless".
And richly documented code is non-virtually worthless.
If you don't believe me, try parsing one of these so-called "literate programs." Any 10-year vet will far more quickly grok a piece of code when its textual flow isn't disrupted by verbiage that only makes sense to its author.
Re: Peter Naur's view of programming
#76I am sometimes guilty of reading the comments before reading the article. I often find the reactions more concise, insightful, and valuable to me than the source material. That said: If you are reading this comment and haven’t read the article, go read the article instead. This is an inverse scenario: imho most of the comments here are interesting but have only marginal value building from the insight of the article.
The author doesn't make a good case for "The main value of a software company is the mapping of source code and problem space in the developer’s heads" being a universal truth. There are some problem domains and practical development and deployment roadblocks that simply make certain source code more valuable than others. Nowadays it seems people are more willing to throw money at open sourcing solutions so competing firms don't have to roll their own but thats not a hard and fast phenomenon.
Re: Peter Naur's view of programming
#77"source code being worthless" is actually a huge red flag that something is deeply wrong with the way our industry works. There is too much in-house knowledge that isn't being codified. Software production shouldn't be like e.g. Jet engine production, where it's all nontransferable lore.
I posit if everyone was automatically build able and deployable (say with Nix) across the board. Source code would have more value.
Now, it still would be true that less source code is better than more source code, so line by line / marginally source code is a liability. But reproducible functionality would be valuable.
The remaining worthless might have to do with much especially b2b proprietary software being utter crap, and all the value being in the sales relationship and none in product/service being traded.
Re: Peter Naur's view of programming
#78"source code being worthless" is actually a huge red flag that something is deeply wrong with the way our industry works. There is too much in-house knowledge that isn't being codified. Software production shouldn't be like e.g. Jet engine production, where it's all nontransferable lore. I posit if everyone was automatically build able and deployable (say with Nix) across the board. Source code would have more value.…
I think it’s incentives, partially.
Programmers say their job is to put themselves out of their jobs. People don’t want to be out of their jobs, really. And we know that doesn’t happen. If anything, it locks them into their job, as “subject matter experts”.
Also, most applications are built on a million layers of reusable abstractions. Even in the highest level of the code people are using frameworks and other libraries. A lot of source code is just business logic and glue code when you remove the stuff it is built upon, which tends to be much better (and many times, open and free).
Re: Peter Naur's view of programming
#79source code is excrement. an unfortunate side effect necessitated by the immaturity of our tools. someday we'll make software without it and life will be much better for the poo tenders.
I disagree. It’s the offloading of a decision space very carefully explored. Perhaps “language” and “syntax” can be generalized (ie “excrement”), but the ability to offload a decision space about how to react to a given scenario, without requiring someone to be actively thinking about the minutiae of the problem space, will always have value. Whether that takes the form of a dependency graph in a software application…
if source code takes the form of human language I would no longer call it source code - it still might be excrement but not necessarily so.
Re: Peter Naur's view of programming
#80Anyone read the post author's book, Hiring Engineers? Is it any good and worth the $75?