Laws of Software Engineering

Post by account42 » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 11:33 AM UTC

materielle wrote: post #441

f1shy wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is to me incredible, how many „developers“, even “10 years senior developers” have no idea how to use a dubugger and or profiler. I’ve even met some that asked “what is a profiler?” I hope I’m not insulting anybody, but to me is like going to an “experienced mechanic” and they don’t know what a screwdriver is.

It’s because in most enterprise contexts: 1) Most bugs are integration bugs. Whereby multiple systems are glued together but there’s something about the API contract that the various developers in each system don’t understand. 2) Most performance issues are architectural. Unnecessary round trips, doing work synchronously, fetching too much data. Debuggers and profilers don’t really help with those problems. I persona…

Post by account42 » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 11:47 AM UTC

tombert wrote: post #335

GuB-42 wrote: post #138

> Premature optimization is the root of all evil. There are few principle of software engineering that I hate more than this one, though SOLID is close. It is important to understand that it is from a 1974 paper, computing was very different back then, and so was the idea of optimization. Back then, optimizing meant writing assembly code and counting cycles. It is still done today in very specific applications, but t…

The biggest issue I have with premature optimization is stuff that really doesn't matter . For example, in Java I usually use ConcurrentHashMap, even in contexts that a regular HashMap might be ok. My reasoning for this is simple: I might want to use it in a multithreaded context eventually and the performance differences really aren't that much for most things; uncontested locks in Java are nearly free. I've gotten…