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Modules, not microservices

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Re: Modules, not microservices

#21

Post by hgsgm »

mbork_pl wrote: post #13
surprisetalk wrote: post #2

I suspect that most people would be better off favoring inlined code over modules and microservices. It's okay to not organize your code. It's okay to have files with 10,000 lines. It's okay not to put "business logic" in a special place. It's okay to make merge conflicts. The overhead devs spend worrying about code organization may vastly exceed the amount of time floundering with messy programs. Microservices aren'…

> It's okay to have files with 10,000 lines. Ever since my time as a mathematician (I worked at a university) and using LaTeX extensively, I never understood the "divide your documents/code into many small files" mantra. With tools like grep (and its editor equivalents), jumping to definition, ripgrep et al., I have little problem working with files spanning thousands of lines. And yet I keep hearing that I should di…

grep can search multiple files. Tags can jump between files.

LaTeX is an obvious case: why pay to recompile the whole huge project, for each tiny change?

Re: Modules, not microservices

#22

Post by pshirshov »

SomeoneOnTheWeb wrote: post #14
surprisetalk wrote: post #2

I suspect that most people would be better off favoring inlined code over modules and microservices. It's okay to not organize your code. It's okay to have files with 10,000 lines. It's okay not to put "business logic" in a special place. It's okay to make merge conflicts. The overhead devs spend worrying about code organization may vastly exceed the amount of time floundering with messy programs. Microservices aren'…

I strongly disagree on this one. 10+K lines files are absolutely unreadable most of the time. Separating business logic than other parts of the application helps maintaining it and making everything evolve in parallel, without mixing things up. It also helps to clearly see where business logic happens.

And of course it's lot easier to read 200k+ LoC shattered around twenty repos.

Re: Modules, not microservices

#23

Post by wodenokoto »

I’m surprised none of the big 3 cloud providers have come out with a cloud native language where modules or even classes gets deployed as micro services that scales horizontally.

Then you can have a mono repo that deploys to multiple micro services / cloud functions / lambdas as needed depending on code changes and programmers don’t have to worry about RPC or json when communicating between modules and can just call the damn function normally.

Re: Modules, not microservices

#24

Post by karamanolev »

SomeoneOnTheWeb wrote: post #14
surprisetalk wrote: post #2

I suspect that most people would be better off favoring inlined code over modules and microservices. It's okay to not organize your code. It's okay to have files with 10,000 lines. It's okay not to put "business logic" in a special place. It's okay to make merge conflicts. The overhead devs spend worrying about code organization may vastly exceed the amount of time floundering with messy programs. Microservices aren'…

I strongly disagree on this one. 10+K lines files are absolutely unreadable most of the time. Separating business logic than other parts of the application helps maintaining it and making everything evolve in parallel, without mixing things up. It also helps to clearly see where business logic happens.

I'm inbetween. 10K line files are usually extremely messy, but they can be written not to - a large number of well-organized, well-capsulated Same for business logic - very clear separation can be cumbersome sometimes, but otherwise it becomes messy if you're not careful. And careful people just tend to separate it.

Re: Modules, not microservices

#25

Post by pshirshov »

mbork_pl wrote: post #13
surprisetalk wrote: post #2

I suspect that most people would be better off favoring inlined code over modules and microservices. It's okay to not organize your code. It's okay to have files with 10,000 lines. It's okay not to put "business logic" in a special place. It's okay to make merge conflicts. The overhead devs spend worrying about code organization may vastly exceed the amount of time floundering with messy programs. Microservices aren'…

> It's okay to have files with 10,000 lines. Ever since my time as a mathematician (I worked at a university) and using LaTeX extensively, I never understood the "divide your documents/code into many small files" mantra. With tools like grep (and its editor equivalents), jumping to definition, ripgrep et al., I have little problem working with files spanning thousands of lines. And yet I keep hearing that I should di…

Just one of many reasons: parallel compilation.

Re: Modules, not microservices

#27

Post by gls2ro »

mbork_pl wrote: post #13
surprisetalk wrote: post #2

I suspect that most people would be better off favoring inlined code over modules and microservices. It's okay to not organize your code. It's okay to have files with 10,000 lines. It's okay not to put "business logic" in a special place. It's okay to make merge conflicts. The overhead devs spend worrying about code organization may vastly exceed the amount of time floundering with messy programs. Microservices aren'…

> It's okay to have files with 10,000 lines. Ever since my time as a mathematician (I worked at a university) and using LaTeX extensively, I never understood the "divide your documents/code into many small files" mantra. With tools like grep (and its editor equivalents), jumping to definition, ripgrep et al., I have little problem working with files spanning thousands of lines. And yet I keep hearing that I should di…

I think what goes wrong with dividing is people truly just splitting the code into multiple files.

I think the code should be split conceptually thus not just copy/paste part of code from main file to submodules, but split the code around some functional bounderies or concepts so that each file is doing one thing and compose those concepts into more abstract concepts.

So that when I try to debug something I can decide where I want to zoom in and thus be able to quickly identify the needed files.

Re: Modules, not microservices

#28

Post by hgsgm »

beefield wrote: post #17
mbork_pl wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's okay to have files with 10,000 lines. Ever since my time as a mathematician (I worked at a university) and using LaTeX extensively, I never understood the "divide your documents/code into many small files" mantra. With tools like grep (and its editor equivalents), jumping to definition, ripgrep et al., I have little problem working with files spanning thousands of lines. And yet I keep hearing that I should di…

Because one day someone else may need to read and understand your code?

Mathematicians rarely collaborate by forking and improving other papers. They rewrite from scratch, because communicating ideas isn't considered the important part, getting credit for a new paper is.

Re: Modules, not microservices

#29

Post by louthy »

surprisetalk wrote: post #2

I suspect that most people would be better off favoring inlined code over modules and microservices. It's okay to not organize your code. It's okay to have files with 10,000 lines. It's okay not to put "business logic" in a special place. It's okay to make merge conflicts. The overhead devs spend worrying about code organization may vastly exceed the amount of time floundering with messy programs. Microservices aren'…

... then before you know it your code-base is 10 million lines long and you have no idea where anything is, what the side-effects of calling X are, what's been deprecated, onboarding is a nightmare, retention of staff is difficult, etc. You may be right for the smallest of applications, or whilst you're building an MVP, but if your application does anything substantial and has to live forever (a web app, for example), then you will have to get organised.

Re: Modules, not microservices

#30

Post by koliber »

pshirshov wrote: post #22
SomeoneOnTheWeb wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly disagree on this one. 10+K lines files are absolutely unreadable most of the time. Separating business logic than other parts of the application helps maintaining it and making everything evolve in parallel, without mixing things up. It also helps to clearly see where business logic happens.

And of course it's lot easier to read 200k+ LoC shattered around twenty repos.

The problem arises when you need to read the code of other modules or services. If you can rely on them working as they should, and interact with them using their well-defined and correctly-behaving interfaces, you won't need to read the code.

I'm a proponent of keeping things in a monolith as long as possible. Break code into files. Organize files into modules. A time may come when you need to separate out services. Often, people break things out too early, and don't spend enough effort on thinking how to break things up or on the interfaces.

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