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A Theory of Software Architecture

danuker.go.ro

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Re: A Theory of Software Architecture

#41

Post by Huggernaut »

AaronFriel wrote: post #35

A few years ago I was on a team and the dev lead had a practice of sharing Gary Bernhardt's Boundaries talk every time there was some degree of rotation or churn on the team. Almost part of the onboarding. As a functional programming aficionado, I didn't need the sales pitch, but it was the presentation that was gripping. Keep in mind, Ruby isn't a functional language, but here was this presenter describing essential…

I think Gary shared a Twitter related project that was written in this way, but do you have any examples of other projects by any chance?

Re: A Theory of Software Architecture

#42

Post by dnautics »

AaronFriel wrote: post #35

A few years ago I was on a team and the dev lead had a practice of sharing Gary Bernhardt's Boundaries talk every time there was some degree of rotation or churn on the team. Almost part of the onboarding. As a functional programming aficionado, I didn't need the sales pitch, but it was the presentation that was gripping. Keep in mind, Ruby isn't a functional language, but here was this presenter describing essential…

The talk is fantastic. The interesting thing about that talk is that he advocates using a functional style in ruby and quietly suggests that in the end the coder should 'probably use erlang'. It turned out that jose valim was working on elixir at that time, which basically became exactly what gary was asking for (a rubyish erlang). It's a shame that gary doesn't use elixir.

Re: A Theory of Software Architecture

#43

Post by makach »

We have built software for a long time and we have learned a lot. There are many good ways (patterns) to reuse when you need to solve a particular problem. Uncle Bob speaks the truth.

For me, the challenge has never been with the architecture or our combined technical knowledge.

What I have observed as the main challenge is that most technologists start solving the problem before they know what the problem is.

Re: A Theory of Software Architecture

#44

Post by dnautics »

Huggernaut wrote: post #41
AaronFriel wrote: post #35

A few years ago I was on a team and the dev lead had a practice of sharing Gary Bernhardt's Boundaries talk every time there was some degree of rotation or churn on the team. Almost part of the onboarding. As a functional programming aficionado, I didn't need the sales pitch, but it was the presentation that was gripping. Keep in mind, Ruby isn't a functional language, but here was this presenter describing essential…

I think Gary shared a Twitter related project that was written in this way, but do you have any examples of other projects by any chance?

"most projects in elixir". Some good open-source examples are oban, hex.pm, papercups.io

Re: A Theory of Software Architecture

#45

Post by rsa25519 »

speedgoose wrote: post #32

I understand that the point of his example is to introduce the reader to a variant of the very classic multitier architecture with layers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multitier_architecture But I prefer the first version of the example, because while it's named "complex code" I think it's the simplest version. I think that there is no need to decouple this simple and straightforward function in three functions that…

Agreed. Abstractions are more mentally expensive than a single concrete idea but less expensive than many concrete ideas. When something doesn't need to be abstract, especially in a language where refactoring is easy, it should not be abstract.

Re: A Theory of Software Architecture

#46

Post by Spearchucker »

makach wrote: post #43

We have built software for a long time and we have learned a lot. There are many good ways (patterns) to reuse when you need to solve a particular problem. Uncle Bob speaks the truth. For me, the challenge has never been with the architecture or our combined technical knowledge. What I have observed as the main challenge is that most technologists start solving the problem before they know what the problem is.

This, so very much. It helps to spend time understanding a situation before assuming you have appropriate ideas about changing it. Management consultants (good ones may be rare, but they exist) have some pretty complex process models just to get a handle on the problem.

Re: A Theory of Software Architecture

#47

Post by AaronFriel »

Huggernaut wrote: post #41
AaronFriel wrote: post #35

A few years ago I was on a team and the dev lead had a practice of sharing Gary Bernhardt's Boundaries talk every time there was some degree of rotation or churn on the team. Almost part of the onboarding. As a functional programming aficionado, I didn't need the sales pitch, but it was the presentation that was gripping. Keep in mind, Ruby isn't a functional language, but here was this presenter describing essential…

I think Gary shared a Twitter related project that was written in this way, but do you have any examples of other projects by any chance?

Ah, I am blocked by Gary on Twitter and there is some irony that his Boundaries talk culminates in a Twitter client. (Gary if you're reading this I enjoyed your feed!)

I'm not aware of any good OSS examples, either.

I think React and Redux are in a way an implementation of these concepts. React is a view layer that sends messages and each component is (ideally) a pure function of state, and sometimes its own history. It's so, so easy to unit test the interactions.

Hooks make it a little harder to reason about, and it's unfortunately easy to write hooks that perform IO and you suddenly end up in a miasma of difficult-to-test code where you have to return to using a mocking library to "replace" IO functions with fake versions, and then you're on a slippery slope again toward mixing interaction and mutation in one layer.

Re: A Theory of Software Architecture

#48

Post by dnautics »

layoutIfNeeded wrote: post #11

I find it amusing how these software architecture gurus always demonstrate their teachings with a cookie-cutter CRUD app. There are software which do things other than making REST calls... Show me how you’d implement a basic MS Paint clone and we can talk!

What is it that makes you think you couldn't implement ms paint in this architecture? I've seen all sorts of thing with this sort of architecture, ranging from dungeon crawlers to distributed virtual machine orchestrators, to file system browsers, etc.

Re: A Theory of Software Architecture

#49

Post by barumi »

layoutIfNeeded wrote: post #11

I find it amusing how these software architecture gurus always demonstrate their teachings with a cookie-cutter CRUD app. There are software which do things other than making REST calls... Show me how you’d implement a basic MS Paint clone and we can talk!

> Show me how you’d implement a basic MS Paint clone and we can talk!

A MS Paint clone is one of those apps that fits rather nicely on a Clean Architecture.

You have the domain model (raster image), you have the application layer (image processing operations over the raster image), and you have the IO/service layer (image exporters/importers, GUI, platform-specific features, etc).

Re: A Theory of Software Architecture

#50

Post by simongray »

forgotmypw17 wrote: post #10
kumarvvr wrote: post #2

Move most of your code to pure functions, that is the number one mantra to solve most scaling problems in software development. Even in an OOP paradigm, it makes sense to make almost all objects as purely functional, with limited use of internal state. The second mantra is to think a thousand times before you name something. I actually keep a list of names (..Manager, ..aggregator,etc.) gleaned from various sources,…

Agree on the functional bit. Naming things: I try to not think about it for more than 10 seconds, and go with the best I've got by then. I find myself renaming things sometimes, and I'm eager to do this when a better name comes to me.

I use the thesaurus that comes with macOS whenever I think of a name and it just doesn't feel right. Then I typically find a more fitting name after spending 20 seconds looking at near synonyms.
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