A significant amount of programming is done by superstition • Hacker News Board

Re: A significant amount of programming is done by superstition

#211

Post by ylem » Sun, Mar 29, 2015, 2:43 AM UTC

prawn wrote: post #91

Gravityloss wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gall's law is related to this. I think it's reasonable that people want to create software components that have been proven to work and then just forget about their internal details and copy-pas... apply them. It's also what Bret Victor has been getting at. Very often the component's input-output mapping is much more relevant than implementation details. And you can get a feel for that by fiddling with the components…

Gall's Law for anyone who didn't know or couldn't remember it: "A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system." – John Gall (1975)

Incidentally, he passed away recently. He had a varied career and was actually my pediatrician and encouraged my interest in astronomy. I only learned at his death about his contributions to systems theory...

Re: A significant amount of programming is done by superstition

#212

Post by coldnebo » Sun, Mar 29, 2015, 1:23 PM UTC

olavk wrote: post #205

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The web might have been created by amateurs, but it works incredibly well. The fact that it was created by amateurs helped make it work incredibly well for amateurs. The professional CS alternatives - gopher and the like - were not successful in comparison. There's a thing in CS where solutions become so clever they become stupid - because the goal stops being task-oriented usefulness, and becomes ideological and fo…

In any case, Tim Berners-Lee wasn't an amateur. He was a computer scientist who had experience with information systems before creating the Web. But his design was clever AND simple and accessible to use for amateurs. If I remember the context of the "created by amateurs" quote, it was really Alan Kay complaining that the web wasn't designed by OO principles. He wanted the web to consist of objects encapsulating thei…

So I agree that TBL himself did a great job designing HTML for exactly what he concieved: distributed documentation. It was not however a system designed for web applications. Almost immediately after it gained popularity, people wanted to represent shopping carts. Even the places where Roy Fielding's thesis on REST are well understood and applied, it is very difficult to turn documents into applications without implicit client server state.

Just because TBL is brilliant doesnt mean his work can be misapplied. Of course, i also blame the people who thought of scaling thousands of existing client server applications for a fraction of the cost: things like shopping carts and online banking. True, it drove the web to what it is today, but at great cost.

Here is another thought: if the web is so great, why are so many companies creating their own tablet/mobile app experience instead? It cant be because it requires less dev knowledge and effort?

Re: A significant amount of programming is done by superstition

#213

Post by rjbwork » Mon, Mar 30, 2015, 1:36 PM UTC

engi_nerd wrote: post #199

vonmoltke wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alas, mathematics is really the "good enough" standard we in CS should strive for just like physics is the "good enough" standard behind ME and EE. Unfortunately as CS opened to the mainstream, I think a deep fear of mathematics led us to view this as "over engineering" even when it wasn't. The results are that the majority of the web is woefully underengineered, requiring far more money and time for inferior product…

What would software programming look like as a true engineering discipline?

(my bias as a C# dev will show here) Most likely a professional association, with a test you have to take to call yourself a software engineer demonstrating basic competency in a couple of paradigms, and a rudimentary knowledge of patterns and practices.

It's 2015, there's no reason that anyone should be writing Big Object Oriented Code, without practicing dependency injection, basic mocking and testing, and other modern development principles. And yet, here we are, with millions to billions of lines of terrible new code written every year.

Re: A significant amount of programming is done by superstition

#214

Post by toddkaufmann » Mon, Mar 30, 2015, 3:04 PM UTC

itchyouch wrote: post #127

anon4 wrote: post #14

I'll have to admit something about myself -- I've never been able to learn how to do anything from just reading its first principles. I need to have a working example that I can then adapt and change and observe changes in the result. This has been especially true in programming. I've been writing programs in some capacity for 18 years now and not once in that time have I been able to simply read the reference manual…

As you've pointed out, "no intuitive knowledge", the first principles of a language/api/framework come implicitly attached with design patterns that are probably fairly deep for whatever reason. Your usage of them gets you familiar with the framework, thus your ability to work with them. I would also concur that practice is necessary before being able to construct anything from scratch. The cognition of programming l…

At the other end of the spectrum from practicing "scales", there is the growing size and complexity of libraries and APIs. If you only scratch the surface, learn the minimal necessary, then go on to learning something else, then it's hard gain fluency.

On the other hand, you should only be repeating the same patterns so many times before you build something so you don't have to replace yourself again...

Maybe it's an 80/20 mix; mostly repetition, part novel content.