Kernighan and Pike were right: Do one thing, and do it well
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Re: Kernighan and Pike were right: Do one thing, and do it well
#2It saddens me that he didn't have a cartoon with one saying "High cohesion!" and another (smoking a pipe) saying "Low Coupling!"
Re: Kernighan and Pike were right: Do one thing, and do it well
#3Its an insightful read and the final graph analogy seems very apposite. But here is the rub: if microservices is a general graph pattern, it includes all the other patterns (likear, hub and spoke etc) as these are all just particular graphs.
In other words, you could implememt unix pipe like or plugin like microservices by applying certain constraints.
Re: Kernighan and Pike were right: Do one thing, and do it well
#4I take issue with the pasta diagram.
I was there, in the 1990's, as a working professional not a hobbyist. The popular architecture was, for better or worse, structured as layers, not spaghetti.
Some software from the 80s might meet that definition, but I think it's uncharitable (almost to the point of insulting) to assert that until the 2000s most programmers didn't know how to write anything but spaghetti code.
Re: Kernighan and Pike were right: Do one thing, and do it well
#5I take issue with the pasta diagram. I was there, in the 1990's, as a working professional not a hobbyist. The popular architecture was, for better or worse, structured as layers, not spaghetti. Some software from the 80s might meet that definition, but I think it's uncharitable (almost to the point of insulting) to assert that until the 2000s most programmers didn't know how to write anything but spaghetti code.
There was a moment when OOP was the new hot thing that code got real noodly, but this was arguably a temporary regresssion.
Re: Kernighan and Pike were right: Do one thing, and do it well
#6Good article, but to me it seems to be co-opting the term enshitification in a strange way:
> Large codebases will eventually reach an “enshittification point” — the point at which bugs are introduced faster than they can reasonably be fixed.
I think of enshitification primarily as an organisational/business phenomenon rather than a technical one.
It doesn’t necessarily emerge “bottom up” as the result of technical debt but from top down as a result of misalignment of values between the brutally commercial goals of the business and the values/goals if its customers. Tech debt and development velocity do play into this but I don’t think it’s the primary driver of it.
The term is a useful one at that level of abstraction imho because we already have quite a lot of language to describe things like this at the lower, more technical level.
Re: Kernighan and Pike were right: Do one thing, and do it well
#7Its an insightful read and the final graph analogy seems very apposite. But here is the rub: if microservices is a general graph pattern, it includes all the other patterns (likear, hub and spoke etc) as these are all just particular graphs. In other words, you could implememt unix pipe like or plugin like microservices by applying certain constraints.
Right, but implementing a restricted domain (pipes) with tools designed for a more general domain (graphs), gives up the efficiencies and reduced complexity of the restricted domain.
That is why we have restricted domains.
Re: Kernighan and Pike were right: Do one thing, and do it well
#8The basic point is right, but I think a lot of the details are off. The core idea is composition. A system is compositional if you can build it from small reusable parts. It's one of the key ideas in functional programming, and it's somewhat core to object-oriented programming. (OO is too big to be able to claim their is a consistent philosophy behind it.)
But ... firstly, let's stop with the Unix worship. They didn't deliver, even in the domain of the terminal. My copy of `ls` has at least 40 flags (where I stopped counting). Secondly, people have tried composition on the desktop. That's what CORBA, COM, and OLE were all about. They all kinda sucked for various reasons. Finally, the place at which the author arises has been around for as long as Unix: it's Emacs.
Re: Kernighan and Pike were right: Do one thing, and do it well
#9The basic point is right, but I think a lot of the details are off. The core idea is composition. A system is compositional if you can build it from small reusable parts. It's one of the key ideas in functional programming, and it's somewhat core to object-oriented programming. (OO is too big to be able to claim their is a consistent philosophy behind it.) But ... firstly, let's stop with the Unix worship. They didn'…
Not only is COM still around, it is the main delivery mechanism for Windows APIs since Vista.
Agree with UNIX worship point, I also had it, I was young and naive, lacking experience in the history of computer systems.
Re: Kernighan and Pike were right: Do one thing, and do it well
#10The basic point is right, but I think a lot of the details are off. The core idea is composition. A system is compositional if you can build it from small reusable parts. It's one of the key ideas in functional programming, and it's somewhat core to object-oriented programming. (OO is too big to be able to claim their is a consistent philosophy behind it.) But ... firstly, let's stop with the Unix worship. They didn'…
Not only is COM still around, it is the main delivery mechanism for Windows APIs since Vista. Agree with UNIX worship point, I also had it, I was young and naive, lacking experience in the history of computer systems.
Wow, I didn't realise. I haven't paid attention to Windows APIs for a long time. I really thought it would have died a long time ago.