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Comment by arinlen | Hacker News Reader

> I think many, maybe most, companies that try to build loosely coupled and highly cohesive code bases end up failing and it ends up being a mess.

Companies who try to build any type of codebase end up with a mess. Always. No exception.

There is no reason to pretend software development's natural tendency to increase entropy is exclusive to a specific type of software architecture. In fact, some developers even go to the extent of criticising software architects for existing, because they have "rules" and enforce "order" and "organization".

If anything, being mindful of a specific architecture goes already a long way to fight entropy.

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> Companies who try to build any type of codebase end up with a mess. Always. No exception.

I love how demonstratively wrong this is

Every single codebase doing anything nontrivial is mess. Show me a code base that you can marvel at it's beauty, elegance, and how neat and tidy everything is organized and one of two things will be true about it.

1. It has never touched the real world, real hardware, or real users.

2. All the mess is hidden in some dependencies that handle the integration points with the outside world.

You cannot escape the fact that the world is full of sharp edge cases, no perfect abstraction exists, all models of the real world are approximate, there is no architecture that survives changes to business requirements, and all assumptions made about the environment where your code runs will eventually be false, which makes a mess out of code that was once nice and tidy.

I first thought to post some links to code bases that, in my eyes, aptly counter argue your claim.

Then I realised that you have already solidly placed yourself in a corner and are bound to defend that corner no matter what I am going to post. Since there's no objective measure of what constitutes as a mess (in contrast to what is simply not perfect) it's also easy to convince yourself that the statement always remains true.

Alas.

"I really have proof for my argument, I swear, I'm just too petty to provide it, trust me bro". Are you serious?

I am. But the words you so freely attribute to me are not what I wrote or meant, and no amount of quotation marks around them will change that. Bro.

No shit, sherlock.

Instead of continuing the bickering, you could show us the code base, how 'bout that?

> I first thought to post some links to code bases that, in my eyes, aptly counter argue your claim.

...but then you realized they weren't supportive of your baseless assertion, and arguably were a hot mess as well.

I have a truly devastating reply that this website's comment length is too small to contain.

I’ve worked on a lot of open source projects and large proprietary code bases that I’d call not-a-mess. I’m not sure what that means to you, to me it means well-engineered in terms of quality criteria, rather than aesthetics, as it seems to be the case for many.

You sound very defeatist to me. I’m under the impression you’ve only worked in teams that don’t have an engineering mindset but rather throw-shit-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks coding sweatshops. You may want to look for a new company to regain your pride in your work..

Where do you work?

Probably in a small close-nit team working on something for no more than a year or two that will be impossible to maintain once the authors move on to greener pastures.

Infinite real world edge cases says hello.

I would love to see some demonstration of how wrong this is.

You forgot to do the demonstrativeness, just saying it doesn't make it so.

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