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Organizing complexity is the most important skill in software development

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Re: Organizing complexity is the most important skill in software development

#241

Post by mkramlich »

I agree that complexity is far up there. But also risk. Also long term thinking. And net cost or net profit. The more years I have under my belt, I think more and more not only about complexity, but also risk, cost, profit. Code and hardware is just a means to an end. Not the end itself.

But yes, seek the minimum amount of complexity to materialize the inherent, necessary complexity. But don't allow a drop of complexity more than that. Architecture astronauts, pattern fashionistas, I'm looking at you. KISS. Spend your complexity dollars where it gives you something you truly need or want. Don't do things Just Because.

Re: Organizing complexity is the most important skill in software development

#242

Post by notNow »

jdimov9 wrote: post #71

I agree that most complexity in software systems comes from managing state. So here is a simple solution - stop doing it. Stop managing state. Use the right tools for the job. Most mainstream programming languages are ridiculously inadequate for building any production software of any significant complexity without introducing more problems than you are trying to solve. Use a mature functional programming language th…

Here comes the Erlang/FP crusader ...

Re: Organizing complexity is the most important skill in software development

#243

Post by notNow »

grandalf wrote: post #119

In a recent job I ended up rewriting some of the codebase with this kind of stuff in mind... the results: - 10% of the LOC as previously - Code significantly more understandable - Jr. developer on the team suddenly became a rockstar b/c he could understand what was going on.

Reducing LOC is not always necessarily a good thing. I'd always favor a more readable codebase that takes some effort to explain its purpose than terse one that is vague and obscure that makes your head spin trying to figure out its raison d'etre

Re: Organizing complexity is the most important skill in software development

#244

Post by baddox »

BurningFrog wrote: post #143
msandford wrote: post #7

This is incredibly true. I once turned 60kLoC of classic ASP in VBScript into about 20kLoC of python/django including templates. And added a bunch of features that would have been impossible on the old code-base. It turned the job from hellish (features were impossible to add) to very nearly boring (there wasn't much to do anymore). So with this newfound freedom I built some machines to automate the data entry and on…

> Sadly there's (seemingly) no way to interview people for this ability I had one interview where the interviewer simply showed me a printed page of code, and asked me to talk about it. I spotted a few problems and debatable constructs, and we had a good 3 minutes discussion. Since at least I spend more time reading code than writing it, that felt like a truer test of my abilities than many of the coding tasks. PS. Y…

I think that's a good way to not get false positives, but it seems like something that could yield a lot of false negatives.

Re: Organizing complexity is the most important skill in software development

#245

Post by scintill76 »

CydeWeys wrote: post #157
knodi123 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our main product was developed on a keyboard that was missing a "w". It's not a big deal, though - you can use a for(;;) loop instead of a while loop without hurting performance. And it's easy to just avoid "w" words in the view templates by being clever with word choice. Of course, that's not true at all. But giving someone a defective-but-not-entirely-broken tool can be a clever way of seeing how they work around p…

It's too contrived though; not having a single working keyboard anywhere isn't a real business situation. A slow bottlenecked server, sure. If the "w" key weren't working I'd copy-paste "w" characters from elsewhere in the document, or bring up the on-screen keyboard. Writing bastardized code -- for (;;), really?! -- would be a huge negative against a candidate. And, of course, if a company really didn't have a worki…

I actually like "for (;;) {}" as an idiom for an infinite loop (or at least, the terminating conditions are in the body rather than the loop construct itself.) It maybe stands out more than "while(true)", so readers can easily see what's going on. But maybe that's just a justification, and the real reason is that it looks clever because not everybody knows you can do that with a C-style for loop.

Re: Organizing complexity is the most important skill in software development

#246

Post by bcheung »

I can't load the page, but I would definitely agree with the title.

From my own experience programming here are some the most common and best ways to better organize complexity:

1) Create DSLs. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is the theory that an individual's thoughts and actions are determined by the language or languages that individual speaks. By creating DSLs we are able to reason about a problem domain with increased efficiency.

2) Reduce cognitive load by reducing state. By reducing the number of variables in a given section of code we can more easily reason about it. values.map (x) -> x * x is a lot more understandable than newArr = [] ; for (i=0; i3) Build tools to build tools. The history of computing is one of building tools on top of tools. From assembly language to C to high level languages. What is is the next step? I suspect it is some kind of polyglot environment that is a hodgepodge of languages all working together combined with automated code creation from AI.

Re: Organizing complexity is the most important skill in software development

#247

Post by bottled_poe »

tempodox wrote: post #68
qznc wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The promise of Design Patterns (tm) is that you can systematically learn to organize your code. The article argues that only experience does.

If it were that easy, you could write a compiler compiler that knows all the “design patterns” and generates perfect solutions for all problems. Remember the 239th Rule of Acquisition, “Never be afraid to mislabel a product.” That goes for methodologies, too. If they could get away with it, they would probably say it cures baldness, too.

I believe that would actually be possible if we had a standardized problem specification format.

Re: Organizing complexity is the most important skill in software development

#248

Post by grandalf »

notNow wrote: post #243
grandalf wrote: post #119

In a recent job I ended up rewriting some of the codebase with this kind of stuff in mind... the results: - 10% of the LOC as previously - Code significantly more understandable - Jr. developer on the team suddenly became a rockstar b/c he could understand what was going on.

Reducing LOC is not always necessarily a good thing. I'd always favor a more readable codebase that takes some effort to explain its purpose than terse one that is vague and obscure that makes your head spin trying to figure out its raison d'etre

I agree. In this case the code got significantly better organized and more readable in the process.

Re: Organizing complexity is the most important skill in software development

#249

Post by JohnTHaller »

duderific wrote: post #238
JohnTHaller wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back when I worked corporate I loved when I got time to make the apps I was responsible for better. Getting free time to refactor an outdated procedure written by four different developers who'd all left that just barely worked, albeit slowly, was something I enjoyed. As was getting a couple days for minor bug fixes and small feature adds. I happily had the freedom to sit with the users directly and ask them about ho…

That sounds really nice. At my current position, we never get time just to refactor, though supposedly that time is "just around the corner." We are always cranking against tight deadlines. Consequently, we end up with some pretty jacked up code, since as the saying goes "you never get it right the first time."

It was. It wasn't as often as I'd have liked. But it was nice to have once in a while. And the users loved it. It's amazing how much someone likes a developer sitting down next to them applying their full ability to try and make their job better.

Re: Organizing complexity is the most important skill in software development

#250

Post by yellowapple »

knodi123 wrote: post #96
w1ntermute wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How'd you do it if the keyboard wasn't working?

Our main product was developed on a keyboard that was missing a "w". It's not a big deal, though - you can use a for(;;) loop instead of a while loop without hurting performance. And it's easy to just avoid "w" words in the view templates by being clever with word choice. Of course, that's not true at all. But giving someone a defective-but-not-entirely-broken tool can be a clever way of seeing how they work around p…

Somewhat off-topic, but I'm suddenly reminded of a joke proposal for Fortran to drop the letter 'O' entirely from its character set (in response to frustration regarding its confusion with '0'), the justification being that 'GOTO' statements would suddenly be impossible and therefore incapable of doing harm.
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