The Only Unbreakable Law [video]
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The Only Unbreakable Law [video]
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Re: The Only Unbreakable Law [video]
#2Even more depressing than "The 20 million lines problem" - because the gist of the talk is that programming with more than one person is doomed to fail, and programming with less than two is even worse.
Re: The Only Unbreakable Law [video]
#3Having watched Casey's Handmade Hero series since day-1, I've always found him to be highly skilled and insightful. While not a game developer myself, learning from his approach to first-principles software development and code optimization has paid dividends in my day to day work nonetheless.
Re: The Only Unbreakable Law [video]
#4tldw?
Re: The Only Unbreakable Law [video]
#5tldw?
You care about this if:
- Software architecture matters to you
- Software performance matters to you
- Team and organizational performance matters to you
Re: The Only Unbreakable Law [video]
#6tldw?
It’s Conway's law.
Re: The Only Unbreakable Law [video]
#7tldw?
conway's law: how it arises, why it's unavoidable, relationship w brooks' and amdahl's laws, how it explains complexity compounding over time in the form of integrating with past organization structure..
Re: The Only Unbreakable Law [video]
#8A law that doesn't make predictions isn't a law. A law that is not falsifiable isn't a law. It is an unscientific belief.
It's truly incredible to me that people, like the person in this video, can speak with such confidence about how, for example from this video, "if we look at an org chart for an organization, and we look at the structure of the products that it produces, we would expect them to basically just be collapses of each other [i.e. a homomorphism]". Also known as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
A sincere person in search of truth asks questions like the following when they encounter a claim:
- can we think of circumstances where this law is not true?
- can we test this claim to show that it is true?
- can a test be devised which would falsify this claim?
- if this claim is true, what are the mechanisms of action for the claim?
- if this claim is true, are there any contradictions that would arise with other things we know are true?
Using the same metaphor used in this video, if the currently recognized law of gravitation (General Relativity) made predictions which were different than what is observed, then that law is wrong. And a scientist would adjust their law to reality and be more than willing to point out the gaps of explanation in our law of gravitation (which they do).
If we're serious about Computer Science (and Software Engineering) being a field in pursuit of truth, we should be as rigorous and critical as other fields of science and engineering when it comes to making claims.
Re: The Only Unbreakable Law [video]
#9Conway's "law" is such a cop-out excuse for shipping shitty software... There's no such law of nature that says you must ship shitty software. Enterprises ship shitty software because the average tenure of their developers is 2 years, and they have no incentive to improve things beyond what's necessary to pay the bills.
Re: The Only Unbreakable Law [video]
#10A law that doesn't make predictions isn't a law. A law that is not falsifiable isn't a law. It is an unscientific belief. It's truly incredible to me that people, like the person in this video, can speak with such confidence about how, for example from this video, "if we look at an org chart for an organization, and we look at the structure of the products that it produces, we would expect them to basically just be c…
Please spare us from truth-seeking and leave that to the philosophers.
In science/engineering we care about instrumentalism, not truth.
All models are wrong. Some are useful.