Big Ball of Mud • Hacker News Board

Re: Big Ball of Mud

#21

Post by hkarthik » Sun, Nov 17, 2013, 6:44 AM UTC

memracom wrote: post #17

The most important thing is to recognize that almost any software project will tend towards Big Ball of Mud as you add features. If you keep aware of this possibility then you can recognize when it is about to happen and give your head a shake, do a bit of design thinking, and move things to a proper loosely coupled architecture. A Big Ball of Mud is not inevitable. It's also important to recognize that a lot of the…

The limited, but minimally viable materials to build the shanty towns is very analogous to using RAD frameworks like the ones you mentioned.

I think the real problem is the subjective nature of deciding when an app is too big and needs to split apart.

Re: Big Ball of Mud

#22

Post by henrik_w » Sun, Nov 17, 2013, 7:05 AM UTC

SapphireSun wrote: post #8

henrik_w wrote: post #5

This is a good, readable paper, with clever pictures to illustrate the points. Many of the ideas in it are well known (especially if you are already familiar with XP). I like the fact that the authors recognize that the BIG BALL OF MUD architecture is successful (in the sense that many working systems have this architecture – or rather lack of architecture). In the paper, they describe the BIG BALL OF MUD architectur…

I agree with most of your points, but software is constrained by physics. Bandwidth (disk/network), calculation speed, which processors to allocate resources, ram. In fact, many software architectural decisions are made because of these inevitable physical barriers. Sometimes the barriers are themselves architectural. How do you network together two computers when there's no simple route for a network cable and the W…

Point taken ;-)

I was thinking more along the lines that you can not have a building with 100 rooms, where each room has a door to every other room. In software on the other hand, nothing (except your own sanity) stops you from having 100 classes, where each class accesses every other class.

Re: Big Ball of Mud

#23

Post by hga » Mon, Nov 18, 2013, 3:52 AM UTC

nabla9 wrote: post #3

FYI: Big Ball of Mud has two meanings. The one author uses and Lisp meaning. "APL is like a beautiful diamond - flawless, beautifully symmetrical. But you can't add anything to it. If you try to glue on another diamond, you don't get a bigger diamond. Lisp is like a ball of mud. Add more and it's still a ball of mud - it still looks like Lisp." - unknown (alternatively Lisp is bean bag because it always returns to it…

Joel Moses, the father of Macsyma, is the author of this quote.