Things I've learned about writing software after 12 years • Hacker News Board

Re: Things I've learned about writing software after 12 years

#11

Post by courtf » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 10:38 PM UTC

walshemj wrote: post #6

radius wrote: post #5

Not sure what all the hate is about. He presented some interesting anecdotes about the quirks of software engineering and then tied it all together with some concrete lessons. Maybe 5K words without any sort of lists or clickbait titles is just too much for the average reader.

Or writing at higher level than a 12 or 13 year old :-)

Beyond the grammatical errors, misplaced punctuation and misspellings, and despite the relative novelty of the anecdotes, I thought the writing itself was dull and simplistic. Many paragraphs were just a string of blunt statements without any independent clauses.

According to a copy+paste of the text into http://sarahktyler.com/code/sample.php, the article as a whole reaches Flesch-Kindaid grade level 7.

Re: Things I've learned about writing software after 12 years

#12

Post by mod » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 10:40 PM UTC

Leave it to me to count the zeroes:

> It contained a defect of effectively point zero zero zero zero one inches. that’s 0.000001.

Re: Things I've learned about writing software after 12 years

#13

Post by dmkram » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 10:46 PM UTC

12 years? Sorry to break it to you, but that's a short time.

Re: Things I've learned about writing software after 12 years

#14

Post by tylercubell » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 11:02 PM UTC

acjohnson55 wrote: post #2

I got halfway through this article and then gave up without any idea of what the author learned. Wish the author would have edited this post better.

Why don't you read the last paragraph that summarizes the whole thing?

Re: Things I've learned about writing software after 12 years

#15

Post by wyager » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 11:03 PM UTC

Kenji wrote: post #8

We get the software we deserve. Apparently, people aren't ready to spend more money on performance, reliablility and security. When they buy software, they pay the price of a giant ball of mud (if they aren't expecting it to be free!) and they get a giant ball of mud. Simple. You call it insanity, I call it market, supply and demand. Of course, the perfectionists are unhappy about that (being one myself I can certain…

>but you have to realize that this kind of perfection in software costs huge amounts of money

Maybe not as much as people think. There are machine-assisted mechanisms for building mathematically perfect software. See Curry-Howard oriented languages like Coq and Agda. It's certainly harder to write perfectly, provably correct programs, but maybe not as hard as most people think.

There is also a lot of middle ground in the form of relatively powerful (but not quite Agda-powerful) type systems.

Re: Things I've learned about writing software after 12 years

#16

Post by Kenji » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 11:09 PM UTC

wyager wrote: post #15

Kenji wrote: post #8

We get the software we deserve. Apparently, people aren't ready to spend more money on performance, reliablility and security. When they buy software, they pay the price of a giant ball of mud (if they aren't expecting it to be free!) and they get a giant ball of mud. Simple. You call it insanity, I call it market, supply and demand. Of course, the perfectionists are unhappy about that (being one myself I can certain…

>but you have to realize that this kind of perfection in software costs huge amounts of money Maybe not as much as people think. There are machine-assisted mechanisms for building mathematically perfect software. See Curry-Howard oriented languages like Coq and Agda. It's certainly harder to write perfectly, provably correct programs, but maybe not as hard as most people think. There is also a lot of middle ground in…

I am familiar with some code-proving tools and functional programming. Verifying such code is tedious and will increase time, cost and skill required for the project substantially. People just aren't ready to pay the price for that. Yet.

Re: Things I've learned about writing software after 12 years

#17

Post by bprater » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 11:15 PM UTC

dmkram wrote: post #13

12 years? Sorry to break it to you, but that's a short time.

12 years is the middle years for a career programmer. Enough to know what patterns aren't serving you, and enough to know that there is still a bunch to learn.

Re: Things I've learned about writing software after 12 years

#18

Post by jdiez17 » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 11:20 PM UTC

The ideas behind this article are good. The author gives some guidelines that have helped them write better software. However, it makes me think about how we can make "making software" better. It seems like the best current way of going about it is to implement these zen-like self-discipline techniques that have helped the OP.

What's so inherently wrong about software? Why is it so damn difficult to write software that doesn't explode if you don't hold your tongue at the right angle?

Re: Things I've learned about writing software after 12 years

#19

Post by Animats » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 11:28 PM UTC

Kenji wrote: post #8

We get the software we deserve. Apparently, people aren't ready to spend more money on performance, reliablility and security. When they buy software, they pay the price of a giant ball of mud (if they aren't expecting it to be free!) and they get a giant ball of mud. Simple. You call it insanity, I call it market, supply and demand. Of course, the perfectionists are unhappy about that (being one myself I can certain…

"We get the software we deserve."

Painfully true. There are techniques for writing better software. They work. They take longer and cost more. They are not widely used outside aerospace.

Re: Things I've learned about writing software after 12 years

#20

Post by jquast » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 11:33 PM UTC

From Edsger Dijkstra: https://youtu.be/RCCigccBzIU?t=13m54s

> ...just after the first successful moon landing [...] I knew that each Apollo flight required some 40,000 new lines of code. [...] I was duly impressed that they got so many lines of code correct. So when I met Joel, I said, "how did you do that? [...] Getting that software right." [...] He said that in one of the calculations of the orbit of the lunar module the moon had been defined as repelling instead of attracting. They had discovered that error by accident. Imagine, by accident five days before the shot.

Sound familiar to anyone?

Some 16 years experience myself, the clarity of "the problem of time" has become the foremost factor of bad software that I knowingly write. I imagine NASA has the same problems that we do.

I've been through about 5 cycles that all occur in the same form: 1) We put the under-performing developers on maintaining "legacy" systems and the seniors begin on the next one. 2) Time is purposely estimated shorter than viable, corners get cut in the software, prototypes are put into production once again, and a new legacy system is born. 3) The good programmers leave, some juniors become seniors and others are hired, and the cycle repeats.

There are many additional mismanagement mistakes that accumulate, but limited time always seems to be at the center of the problem for me. I whole-heartily believe that really great software can be authored by just two or three high quality engineers over the span of a few to many years with a clear vision.