Data-Oriented Design (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Data-Oriented Design (2013)

dataorienteddesign.com

71 pointsTomte8 comments

> Data is all we have. Data is what we need to transform in order to create a user experience. Data is what we load when we open a document. Data is the graphics on the screen and the pulses from the buttons on your game pad

I've been trying to explain this concept to UI-focused devs for years, it's nice to have a (seemingly) well written resource I can point them towards instead.

Yeah, it's such a critical concept that I feel gets lost in the mix of frameworks, languages and fads of the day.

In the end it's just Data all the way down, just Data.

Want to update something in your app on the fly? Just change the Data. Need adjust your UI? Again, data. Once you grasp that then all sorts of composability and techniques become possible.

Lisp takes this to a nice logical conclusion where everything is S-expressions and code is just data.

This looks interesting but is hard to read in the online form (the black on gray is particularly taxing on the eyes). Do the authors plan to make a PDF available, esp if more readable?

I believe this is the source: https://github.com/raspofabs/dodbook

So you can browse the Markdown or potentially run it through some of the "markdown to webbook" services that exist.

Well, this was ironic... the article focuses on the ubiquity of data, but lacks the UI design to get its message through.

The readability feature in Firefox works well FWIW

I guess I'll read the markdown a little bit later because I can't read those pages, but I recall a talk like this given at some game developers confence (something Sony I think) a while back.

But since most of us don't worry about cache misses, I'd like to see some more information about this for a more general programming audience.

I think the clojure folks subscribe to something along these lines, but mostly because they eschew OO.

If you are looking for something to use this good theory on take a gander at Drools http://www.drools.org/ (Apache v2 license)

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