Why Is Payroll Hard - Ron Jeffries
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Re: Why Is Payroll Hard - Ron Jeffries
#2Very true. People wonder why enterprise software takes a lot of developers and long periods of time, and it's because of things like this.
Re: Why Is Payroll Hard - Ron Jeffries
#3Thankfully I've never worked with something this complicated, but it doesn't surprise me (though reading it did give me a good laugh). What I've learned is that when money is involved, any sense of logic and sanity immediately goes right out the window.
Re: Why Is Payroll Hard - Ron Jeffries
#4Sounds like the kind of business logic where Prolog would really shine.
Re: Why Is Payroll Hard - Ron Jeffries
#5Sounds like the kind of business logic where Prolog would really shine.
Yes. Sometimes I think a good way to organize an enterprise system would be to make a trivial CRUD "layer" (no validations there) and then write a bunch of Prolog-clause-like rules. The rules would be the big and interesting part of the system, of course. The system would have to be intelligent enough so that, for performance reasons, after input, only the rules that could possibly affect the input would be run. But then in my modest experience these systems are so complex that sometimes for a simple new input you have to validate a whole bunch of things.
I currently develop health care related software here in Brazil. Total chaos. Once I was talking to a doctor, and he said engineers think mostly about the patterns but doctors think mostly about the exceptions. I think the same applies to business. The doctor in question of course liked our system but had a huge list of feature requests (to treat exceptions).
Re: Why Is Payroll Hard - Ron Jeffries
#6Sounds like the kind of business logic where Prolog would really shine.
It was written in Smalltalk.
Re: Why Is Payroll Hard - Ron Jeffries
#7I just built an internal payroll system for my company. It's been a huge pain because it involves both parts of the business I generally try to avoid - legal, and dealing directly with money.
Oh, a big item missing from the list is dealing internationally. If you think navigating all the state and local laws are hard wait till you look at another country :)
Re: Why Is Payroll Hard - Ron Jeffries
#8Healthcare software has the same kinds of problems. New regulations, rules, and ways that each party in the system attempts to skirt the rules bleed into the code bases of every system.
Thats why a lot of the technology in healthcare is so far behind. One place I worked at still makes $38 mil/year on a system written in C++ and ASP. Replacing it with a modern stack has been on going process for more than 3 years with no end in site. In the mean time, new installations are being brought up with a whole new set of business rules being added that will just have to get ported later.
Re: Why Is Payroll Hard - Ron Jeffries
#9"The debators of the rules are more interested in satisfying the group than in definition or algorithmic simplicity or purity of concept."
This sentence is incredibly useful for understanding why modelling a process hammered out by more than three people will always be more complicated than you think it is.
Re: Why Is Payroll Hard - Ron Jeffries
#10"The debators of the rules are more interested in satisfying the group than in definition or algorithmic simplicity or purity of concept." This sentence is incredibly useful for understanding why modelling a process hammered out by more than three people will always be more complicated than you think it is.
> This sentence is incredibly useful for understanding why modelling a process hammered out by more than three people
Three? I'd go with one. Hell, I'd go with zero, if the one person is a banker or a lawmaker.