Peter Naur's view of programming • Hacker News Board

Re: Peter Naur's view of programming

#101

Post by majormajor » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 9:08 PM UTC

rorykoehler wrote: post #62

chubot wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on the situation. Documentation and in-person meetings aren't mutually exclusive. A meeting to go through the docs and update them is often very useful. Not everything has to be "scalable". There are many parts of the code that only 1 or 3 people will ever work on. In fact in most places I'd say that's most of the code.

I’ve never been unhappy when provided with thorough documentation.

Do you have any examples of sufficiently thorough documentation?

I've basically never been happy with the documentation I've been provided with, whether for internal company code or 3rd party OSS stuff or 3rd party paid stuff...

Re: Peter Naur's view of programming

#102

Post by daotoad » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 9:09 PM UTC

mywittyname wrote: post #96

I feel like the Unix philosophy of very small programs that do one thing, and do it well, is an application of the concepts in this article. > One of Naur’s main conclusions is that making changes to an existing program (to accommodate changing requirements) is often more costly than writing new code from scratch, at least if done by people from a different team. This is because there are intangible aspects of the mo…

But to compose something large you begin to need hundreds of these small tools interacting.

Do you build slightly larger tools that integrate the small tools? Even these larger tools my need to be composed into another level of abstraction to build the final system.

This is essentially the same architecture that you would build with a layered set of abstractions and interfaces.

It's really just a matter of how the different bits communicate that is different.

Re: Peter Naur's view of programming

#103

Post by DavidAdams » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 9:11 PM UTC

ajsharp wrote: post #32

"When we hired a new COO, who had mainly worked at bigger companies before, he was shocked to hear that all our code, communication infrastructure and internal systems were living in the cloud. He argued that we should move to on-premise solutions as soon as possible, partially out of fear of intellectual property theft, partially to appease investors with similar fears." [shudder]

Yeah, my first thought after reading that anecdote was that the new COO should have been fired.

Re: Peter Naur's view of programming

#104

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 9:28 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Peter Naur's view of programming

#105

Post by breck » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 9:32 PM UTC

The more you design your program for the current world, the faster it will go out of date. Try to identify what will still be useful in 30 years, and get that part right.

Re: Peter Naur's view of programming

#106

Post by bennysonething » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 9:34 PM UTC

This is probably one the most poignant things I've read about programming. I've recently been through a handover, left on my own at at a new job, with a long back log full of fairly useless stories, left to forge relationships with the business. Mostly left depressed and stressed. All the while a manager said "I don't understand why the handover is taking so long, it's all documented". Yeah the documentation didn't really tell me much as I lacked the business context. I'm brand new to this domain too. The article has put into words what I've been feeling for the last year.

Re: Peter Naur's view of programming

#107

Post by gamacodre » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 9:36 PM UTC

DavidAdams wrote: post #103

ajsharp wrote: post #32

"When we hired a new COO, who had mainly worked at bigger companies before, he was shocked to hear that all our code, communication infrastructure and internal systems were living in the cloud. He argued that we should move to on-premise solutions as soon as possible, partially out of fear of intellectual property theft, partially to appease investors with similar fears." [shudder]

Yeah, my first thought after reading that anecdote was that the new COO should have been fired.

And the CTO too, for caving to that argument.

Re: Peter Naur's view of programming

#108

Post by bennysonething » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 9:40 PM UTC

cloogshicer wrote: post #4

hallarempt wrote: post #3

_My_ source code is invaluable. It's open, public, free to reuse under the GPL. It's a complete implementation of a painting application used by millions of people. It's a huge amount of knowledge readily accessible. You won't be able to buy something like this for any sum of money, so it's free.

Is it really the source code that has value, or your continued expansion and development of said code? Genuine question. The reason I'm asking, while I was writing the article, I was considering including the youtube-dl fiasco (when the RIAA took it down from GitHub) as an example. People were concerned not because the code was gone (lots of mirrors popped up quickly), but because they were worried that the contribut…

Thanks for writing the article, see my comment else where in this thread. It's really helped me. I just been througha rough ride of a handover.

Re: Peter Naur's view of programming

#109

Post by StillBored » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 9:49 PM UTC

paxys wrote: post #84

Ericson2314 wrote: post #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.…

You could do all that and the code would still not have any intrinsic worth, because if a company gets their hands on it they don't automatically get a team of developers with domain expertise to maintain it going forward. That's where the real value is. Knowledge and experience can never be codified.

So your saying it would take someone the same amount of time to say recreate an OS like windows, without the source code as it would to become proficient in building and maintaining it?

I don't buy that, if I wanted to create a $HIGHDOLLAR application, and It was possible to get away with stealing the source code i'm sure it would happen more frequently.

Its not that the code for windows/etc is worthless, its that anyone attempting to make any money selling a clone that was obviously based on it would be put out of business.

If OTOH, they sold a license to resell products based on the XP64 code base you can bet there would be LTS/embedded/etc type companies pooping up selling their own versions.

So while the effort to get a functioning build system and learn the code base is considerable, its a lot easier than reinventing the wheel. Hence why the code _DOES_ have value.

Re: Peter Naur's view of programming

#110

Post by StillBored » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 9:52 PM UTC

I think the author is seriously confused over the value of some crap his startup created in a couple man years vs actual products with market share, long term maintenance and thousands+ of man years of engineering/testing/documentation time. He even admits that they were rewriting large parts of it on a regular basis. That by itself indicates much of the code actually had little value, if the engineers themselves were throwing it away.

It would be really hard to convince MS/Google/apple/etc that their primary products source code doesn't have any value.