Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Learning Software Architecture

matklad.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 133 posts

Re: Learning Software Architecture

#5

Post by noelwelsh »

I think this really down plays the value of mental model or strategies for organizing code. Take a compiler: often described as a sequence of transformations on an AST, taken to the extreme in the nanopass framework. That's a really useful mental model, and you can extract that model and apply it in other contexts. For example, many business applications are a sequence of transformations on JSON. So they're basically compilers. That can be good architecture in the right situation.

You don't have to call a sequence of transformations a compiler. You can say your AST is an algebraic data type, and your transformations are folds (or structural recursions; same thing). Now you have an abstract model that isn't tied to a particular application, and you can more easily find uses for it.

If you know a bit of maths you might wonder about duals. You will find codata---objects---are the dual of algebraic data. Ok, now we're programming to interfaces. That's also useful in the right context. What's the dual of a fold? An unfold! So now we have another way of looking at transformations, from the point of view of what they produce instead of what they consume. At this point we've basically reinvented reactive programming. And on and on it goes.

You can find most of this in the literature, just not usually presented in a compact and easy to understand form.

(Note, the above description is very quick sketch and I'm not expecting anyone to understand all the details from it alone.)

Shameless self promotion: the book I'm writing is about all these concepts. You can find it here: https://functionalprogrammingstrategies.com/

Re: Learning Software Architecture

#6

Post by ramon156 »

I would like to spend my time more on gaining a mental model of the projects I work on, but I get very demotivated if I start disliking things like the programming language, certain arch. Choices or anything that gets too complex that doesn't seem like its worth my time

It's heavily dependent on the project, but I feel like working as a "fullstack dev" kind of removes the fun of programming. I'm already spending 40 hrs a week looking at the most dull project I can imagine

Re: Learning Software Architecture

#8

Post by mpweiher »

The recommendations are often very good, for example Ousterhouts A Philosophy of Software Design, but seem to be on software development in general, not actually software architecture in particular.

For that, I would recommend the classic texts, such as Software Architecture: Perspectives on an Emerging Discipline (Shaw/Garlan) and really anything you can find by Mary Shaw. Including more recent papers that explore why the field of software architecture did not go the way they foresaw, for example Myths and Mythconceptions: What Does It Mean to Be a Programming Language, Anyhow? or Revisiting Abstractions for Software Architecture and Tools to Support Them

More practically: look at why Unix pipes and filters and REST are successful, and where they fall down and why. Hexagonal architecture is also key.

And a plug for my own contribution, linking software architecture with metaobject protocols as a new foundation for programming languages and programming: Beyond Procedure Calls as Component Glue: Connectors Deserve Metaclass Status. An answer to Mary Shaw's Procedure Calls Are the Assembly Language of Software Interconnection: Connectors Deserve First-Class Status.

Answering the question: if procedure calls are the assembly language, what might a high level language look like? And also maybe that software architecture might have a brighter and more practical future ahead of itself.

Re: Learning Software Architecture

#10

Post by jameshart »

noelwelsh wrote: post #5

I think this really down plays the value of mental model or strategies for organizing code. Take a compiler: often described as a sequence of transformations on an AST, taken to the extreme in the nanopass framework. That's a really useful mental model, and you can extract that model and apply it in other contexts. For example, many business applications are a sequence of transformations on JSON. So they're basically…

I’m not sure what part of the article this is attempting to critique.

But I would say that just because your preferred mental model is an abstract algebraic one where you build an abstract model that can apply to multiple situations doesn’t mean that such an architecture is best for every situation.

The article talks very clearly about the system and social constraints that it is optimizing for architecturally and ‘turning everything into a fold’ doesn’t immediately strike me as helping to meet the fast-build-feedback needs of the deep contributors and easy-and-safe-to-hack-in-modules needs of the weekend warrriors, which is what are described as the goals of the architecture.

But it also doesn’t strike me as very clearly not the case that the architecture has some of the features you’re describing.

It feels rather like you have a pet mental model which you think all architecture should subscribe to, and… I’m sorry but that seems naive.

Post reply on HN