Into the Tar Pit
einarwh.wordpress.com
einarwh.wordpress.com
> Software developers should provide expertise [...], but also in the externalization of mental models to facilitate communication and enable collaborative modelling.
> Software development is largely a communication problem. [...] We should contribute to better concepts and a richer language to describe the domain.
A while back I understood my work as a web developer as a translation from "business speak" into the language of some web framework. An activity not so different from translating a novel from it's original language into some other.
The key point being that one needs to fully understand the "business speak" side of things before one can write it out as computer code.
> We should lead in this effort, not wait for someone else to do it for us.
But neither can we, software developers, do this on our own.
I guess something I had been missing before is the feedback aspect (i.e. the externalization of mental models). However, in my experience most people in the 'business side' aren't interested in understanding the software side, so they are not receptive of what the software engineers have to say about the problem domain (i.e. the business side of things).
Rhe reciprocity, though, is mostly missing. An attempt to understand the IT side is essential for managers but most often they can't be bothered (or bothered to understand the principles of user interfaces, for that matter, anything that falls outside their domain). The few bosses I have had that did try were very good to work for indeed, but such are rare.
I feel there is a gap to be crossed, and settling into a common language and common communication practices are ways to bridge it, but I could never say I understand the business.
I get some basics. We have lots of areas, we need workflows, we design parts, then make them, then sell them. But I certainly don’t have enough knowledge to really understand it.
An effective team needs people who understand the computers and people who understand the business. Though it can sometimes end up a little like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfSnaY1Wp_U .
The problem of software development is not “how to implement a solution to a given
problem without shooting yourself in the foot”. It is to formalize something that
in its nature is informal and unformalizable.
So if every value is going to have one type anyway, I might as well check what it is before runtime.
Lua has some functions that will take different types and do different things with them, but I'd rather do that with polymorphism than with dynamic types.
But as the solution becomes clearer, having the models "formalized" in strong types provides a solid foundation, and supports long-term development and maintenance.
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To bring it back to the topic/article at hand, the author emphasizes the translating of business problems into conceptual models in software.
Business and domain-specific problems as described by the user or client, is like the most ambiguous form of "software", communicated in human language. That includes dynamic or implicit typing, unstable and contradictory data schemata, scopes that leak into each other, unclear logic.
That means, software developers ought to become more "multi-lingual" and fluent in the language and thinking process of the users.
When the author says, "Software development is largely a communication problem", I also see it as a cross-cultural communication problem.
The translation - "formalization" - into computer-speak, into hardware/software terms, can never be perferct, since like all translation, there are huge missing areas from one culture or language to another, some concepts don't translate well (or at all), and necessarily, the worldview and biases of the translator will shape the result.
That metaphor also implies, what's important is the shared understanding between cultures, let's say the "business" and the "tech/software" side.
I agree with the author that it's up to the latter experts, to take on the responsibility of cultivating such understanding, to provide the vocabulary and conceptual framework for the business side to express their needs and problems, to collaborate in their solution and formalization to software.
This is not what "Out of the Tarpit" is about. Out of the tarpit is about a clear separation between the currently complected aspects of "what" do we want our software to do, and "how" do we make it do that with the best possible performance. There is no arguing against that if you currently want to describe a website you'll have to learn some model of how the browser renders stuff, how react or vue or whatever performs update calls, and redraws, and state management and and and.
Out of the tarpit simply argues that these things are relevant but accidental to the problem that we want to solve, and proposes a functional logic-programming hybrid approach which focuses on declarative programming, separation of concerns, and immutable state management.
All of the above are pretty well known best practices by now, even though they're not implemented verbatim as the paper proposes there are still ideas that have found it into mainstream programming.
React is a functional reactive and mostly declarative library that takes care of a lot of state management for you.
Clojure is a functional programming language with heavy emphasis on simplicity, state management and functional programming, with logic extensions.
Differential Dataflow is declaratively describing computation and reactively executing it across clusters.
People rediscover the virtue of relational programming and write more SQL than ever, with ORMS becoming out of style.
If the author had argued that the proposals made in the paper are necessary but not sufficient, fine. But arguing that it's "wrong", because they perceive that the sources of complexity focused on by the paper, are not as important as the ones they choose, is just silly.
He even makes the point for them, by quoting:
> There is no point in using exact methods where there is no clarity in the concepts and issues to which they are to be applied.
This is exactly what the paper is about.
"In order to program something, I should not have to formalise it to the degree that I have to formalise it currently. I should not be forced to choose data-structures, and algorithms that I care about tangentially.
Those should be specified as an afterthought, when the need arises, and when performance, reliability, resource consumption become a concern."
This whole Post reminds me a bit of Tim Minchins 'Storm':
"Programming is full of complexities, yeah But there are answers out there And they won't be found By people sitting around Looking serious And saying 'Isn't code mysterious?' Let's sit here and hope Let's call up the fucking Pope Let's go watch Oprah Interview Deepak Chopra