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The Only Unbreakable Law [video]

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Re: The Only Unbreakable Law [video]

#31

Post by beebmam »

ukj wrote: post #19
beebmam wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So let me try to understand what you're saying here, and correct me if I'm wrong. Is this a mischaracterization of a subset of your claim: "Scientists do not care if their models are truthful, but they do care that their models are useful."?

Yes. Something to that effect. Truth is a philosophical notion. It is not the concern of science. I am aligned with model-dependent realism; or epistemic constructivism or thereabouts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-dependent_realism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(philosophy_of_...

On a scale of 0 to 100, where 0 is no confidence and 100 is 100% certainty, how confident are you in your belief of this philosophy of Constructivism?

Re: The Only Unbreakable Law [video]

#32

Post by chii »

jchw wrote: post #20

I’m fairly conflicted by this, because it’s fairly insightful, but it’s also probably overselling itself. They expound quite hard on the idea that abstraction is inherently bad, and I feel this is a poor choice of words, and perhaps a mistake. Abstractions have cost . In many forms, and especially if the abstraction is a poor one. However… they don’t seem to differentiate between good and bad abstractions. They seem…

> You need some kind of abstraction if you want cheap extensibility.

so does the need for cheap extensibility comes first, in which case you build up the abstraction to enable it? Or does abstraction get built up first, which gives you cheap extensibility, then users start needing it afterwards?

What if clang didn't end up being as popular as it did, and the effort it took for the "cheap" extensibility was never needed as no one actually extended it?

Re: The Only Unbreakable Law [video]

#33

Post by jchw »

chii wrote: post #32
jchw wrote: post #20

I’m fairly conflicted by this, because it’s fairly insightful, but it’s also probably overselling itself. They expound quite hard on the idea that abstraction is inherently bad, and I feel this is a poor choice of words, and perhaps a mistake. Abstractions have cost . In many forms, and especially if the abstraction is a poor one. However… they don’t seem to differentiate between good and bad abstractions. They seem…

> You need some kind of abstraction if you want cheap extensibility. so does the need for cheap extensibility comes first, in which case you build up the abstraction to enable it? Or does abstraction get built up first, which gives you cheap extensibility, then users start needing it afterwards? What if clang didn't end up being as popular as it did, and the effort it took for the "cheap" extensibility was never need…

It’s usually non-trivial to add later, so you have no choice but to essentially make a guess and hope it’s right. There’s basically no real alternative.

Of course, if it is trivial to defer an abstraction until later, then it’s better to do that. But it is almost definitely not for Clang operators, which cross cut almost every distinct unit of the program (lexing, parsing, etc.)

(This is also referenced at some point in the talk itself, though I can’t remember exactly where, but my take is that you can’t really fully understand the ideal architecture to solve a problem before trying to solve it, and in trying to solve it you must make architectural decisions.)

Re: The Only Unbreakable Law [video]

#34

Post by FpUser »

I think basic idea and architectures stay more or less the same for decades. Wrapping it out in some fancy terminology and calling those new does not mean "braking the law". It is like RPC vs CORBA vs DCOM vs /10000 other come and go standards which are essentially the same thing.

Re: The Only Unbreakable Law [video]

#36

Post by Sinidir »

Ygg2 wrote: post #16
0xbadc0de5 wrote: post #3

Having 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.

I've found him passionate and smart. But rarely right. Like him bashing SOLID principles. It read like a man arguing against hammers, and instead suggesting using drills (which is fine if you need to drill a hole but bad advice if you want to hammer a nail). Like yeah, SOLID is over used and over-stated, but they were invented to stop certain set of problems.

Yeah his claims about good and bad are too unconditional and generic. He always looks at it from his specific vantage point and then declares something categorically bad which ticks me off cause its so dogmatic and lacking of contextuality.

Re: The Only Unbreakable Law [video]

#39

Post by jchw »

beebmam wrote: post #8

A 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…

The more I think about this comment, the more I feel it is missing the point. They do expound a fair bit on the term “law” but even admit both that the title is a bit flippant (and not the one they originally wanted to go with) and that their formulation of the concept is not yet meeting criteria necessary to consider it a “law,” only that they believe there probably is an underlying law.

Like many have said in the past, computer science is not really “science” or even engineering. And if that’s true, then software architecture really isn’t science. It’s closer to a soft science if anything. There may not really be a meaningful definition of “law” and that degree of rigor may not be very easy to accomplish. After all, there’s hardly anything objective about it.

However, that doesn’t mean that observations about it are not interesting. I certainly think Conway’s law is interesting despite that it may not meet the criteria to be called a “law” in a harder science.

Re: The Only Unbreakable Law [video]

#40

Post by 1970-01-01 »

beebmam wrote: post #8

A 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…

He spent a few minutes explaining how this isn't a scientific law. I think you missed it. Go 6 minutes in.
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