Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Comments on Duct Tape Programmers and the Culture of Complexity in Software Projects

Comment by Bob Denny on "Duct Tape Programmers and the Culture of Complexity in Software Projects"

suppressed@unknown.org (Bob Denny) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 10:54:14 GMT

Boy does this resonate with me! It's been a lifelong passion of mine, literally. I've been at this programming game for over 40 years without interruption or stagnation. "Good enough" is my thang.

A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

I heard this as a teenager, literally, from Bernie Kreitzer, an aeronautical engineer I worked for as a human spreadsheet calculator for a summer job. He gave me the gift of engineering insight. His partner gave me the gift of a visit to Control Data to see the 6600 in LA. That was it, I was hooked!

When the growth happens a duct-taped solution can become unwieldy after a few iterations. at the current state of XHTML/HTML 4/XHTML 2/HTML 5...

The other half is the art of laying a foundation for growth. Standards like those aren't software, and they are usually the product of academics, not engineers.

However, few agrees on the definition of simplicity. Particularly in the Java space I find this to be an issue, with frameworks that promises to simplify while in reality it does the opposite.

Ha ha, Java, yeah. Don't get me wrong, Java is one of those languages I loved when I was working with it. But it seems to attract adders, not subtractors.

Posted by: Bob Denny

Comment by Casper Bang on "Duct Tape Programmers and the Culture of Complexity in Software Projects"

suppressed@unknown.org (Casper Bang) — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 07:48:40 GMT

Nobody argues that simple isn't better than complex. However, few agrees on the definition of simplicity. Particularly in the Java space I find this to be an issue, with frameworks that promises to simplify while in reality it does the opposite.

Posted by: Casper Bang

Comment by Nika Jones on "Duct Tape Programmers and the Culture of Complexity in Software Projects"

suppressed@unknown.org (Nika Jones) — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 03:09:20 GMT

I agree that simple is better and that shipping is definitely one of those "gotta have" features. However there is one problem with the going-for-duct-taped-code-look approach; that is that a simple system becomes inherently complex (if there is any growth in the system.) When the growth happens a duct-taped solution can become unwieldy after a few iterations. Look at the current state of XHTML/HTML 4/XHTML 2/HTML 5 situation we have (A Comic Strip Explication) ... While shipping should be a priority; over-engineering avoided; one should take as much "thought/design" time as possible to make something that's far from duct-tape as one can get. Nika

Posted by: Nika Jones

Comment by Philipp Reiger on "Duct Tape Programmers and the Culture of Complexity in Software Projects"

suppressed@unknown.org (Philipp Reiger) — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 18:32:21 GMT

Besuchen Sie meine Homepage um mehr zu erfahren.

Posted by: Philipp Reiger

Comment by Daniel Gerson on "Duct Tape Programmers and the Culture of Complexity in Software Projects"

suppressed@unknown.org (Daniel Gerson) — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 11:16:49 GMT

I don't entirely agree. I've written a response on my blog: http://dmg46664.wordpress.com/2009/09/28/occams-razor-now-all-new-and-improved-in-the-digital-age/ Here's an extract: Occam’s razor. Now all new and improved in the digital age. By dmg46664 Dare Osbanio’s blogged about the danger of complex solutions and the benefits of duck-tape programming. Indeed, this philosophy can be applied outside the programming world, but since I’m responding to this specifically I’ll continue to use the software context. I don’t agree. Of course I acknowledge that in order to get software out the door, sometimes you have to scale back on feature creep and can’t always satisfy all concerns on version one. Very often by seeing your software being used you find that all the concerns you had thought to satisfy originally aren’t real concerns. What I disagree with is the mantra that ‘Simpler is always better’. I prefer the Occam’s razor version : ‘Keep things as simple as possible, but no simpler’. It’s ironic that this is easier to understand than the literal translation “Don’t multiply entities unnecessarily”. :) It’s easy to find examples to counter the WWW/Xanadu example that Dare points out. In fact a surprising number of them come from Google. A notable one is Gmail. I was a hotmail user and liked the benefits of a web client. Gmail was late to the game, but they brought with their client significantly more complexity. Namely, threaded conversation view, tagging of emails instead of folders (and the inbox tag, for archiving), and a thick javascript client that would take longer to load initially, but user experience once logged in would be super quick. Coupled with the incentive of significantly more space which was actually eventually matched by hotmail at the time I switched, the added complexity/functionality was a boon for the user. Even as I show off the features of my gmail client to users of MSNLive and Yahoo, they grimace to think that all their organizing of their mail would be lost if they were to switch, the plight that can come from early adoption, coupled with a fear of the unknown. More examples from Google: GWT, a more complex and yet surprisingly powerful way to write javascript, without... (more on the blog).

Posted by: Daniel Gerson

Comment by Obie on "Duct Tape Programmers and the Culture of Complexity in Software Projects"

suppressed@unknown.org (Obie) — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 22:50:09 GMT

It's a shame that Joel soiled an otherwise good book report with his own unreasonable biases against developer testing.

Posted by: Obie