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Comment by krooj | Hacker News Reader

Linus always has a great way of summarizing what others might be thinking (nebulously). What's being said in the article is really mirrored in the lost art of DDD, and when I say "lost" I mean that most developers I encounter these days are far more concerned with algorithms and shuttling JSON around than figuring out the domain they're working within and modelling entities and interactions. In modern, AWS-based, designs, this looks like a bunch of poorly reasoned GSIs in DDB, anemic objects, and script-like "service" layers that end up being hack upon hack. Maybe there was an implicit acknowledgement that the domain's context would be well defined enough within the boundaries of a service? A poor assumption, if you ask me.

I don't know where our industry lost design rigor, but it happened; was it in the schools, the interviewing pipeline, lowering of the bar, or all of the above?

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I’d argue software design has never been taken seriously by industry. It’s always cast in negative terms, associated with individuals seen as politically wrong/irrelevant and brings out ton of commenters who can’t wait to tell us about this one time somebody did something wrong, therefore it’s all bad. Worse, design commits the cardinal sin of not being easily automated. Because of this, people cargo cult designs that tools impose on them, and chafe at the idea that they should think further on what they’re doing. People really want to outsource this thinking to The Experts.

It doesn’t help that isn’t really taught, but is something you self-teach over years, it is seen as less real than code (ergo, not as important). All of these beliefs are ultimately self-limiting and keep you at advanced beginner stage in terms of what you can build, however.

Basically, programmers collectively choose to keep the bar as low as possible and almost have a crab-like mentality on this subject.

I can see a swing finally starting. It isn’t “huge” by any stretch, but at the same time

“deVElOpErS aRe MoRE EXpEnSivE tHaN HArDwaRE”

Commenters are no longer just given free internet points. This is encouraging as these people controlled the narrative around spending time on thinking things through and what types of technical debt you should accept for like 20 YEARS.

I think maybe people are finally sick of having 128 gigs of ram being used by a single 4kb text file.

There is some truth to the idea that developer time is expensive, and can dwarf the monetary gains gotten through micro-optimization.

I agree that some people took the idea to mean "what's a profiler?" and that is why our modern machines still feel sluggish despite being mind-bogglingly fast.

This might be driven by the cost per computation being vastly lower while the benefit having remained mostly constant. There is little incentive for making a text editor that runs in 10k of memory because there is no benefit compared to one that runs in 10 megabytes or, soon, 10 gigabytes.

I spend a lot of my day in VScode and PyCharm and the compute resources I consume in an hour are more than what the Apollo program consumed over its full existence. Our collective consumption at any given decade is most likely larger than the sum of computing resources consumed up until that point in our history.

> most developers I encounter these days are far more concerned with algorithms and shuttling JSON around than figuring out the domain they're working within and modelling entities and interactions

The anemic domain model was identified as an anti-pattern quite a long time ago[1]. It usually shows up along with Primitive Obession[2] and result in a lot of code doing things to primitive types like strings and numbers, with all kinds of validation and checking code all over the place. It can also result in a lot of duplication of code that doesn't look obviously like duplication because it's not syntactically identical, yet it's functionally doing the same thing.

1 https://martinfowler.com/bliki/AnemicDomainModel.html

2 https://wiki.c2.com/?PrimitiveObsession

The industry predominately rewards writing code, not designing software.

I think the results of bad code aren't as obvious. A bad bridge falls down, bad code has to be... refactored/replaced with more code? It goes from one text file that execs don't understand to a different text file that execs doesn't understand.

And once something works, it becomes canon. Nothing is more permanent than a temporary hack that happens to work perfectly. But 1000 temporary hacks do not a well-engineered system make.

I believe that maturing in software development is focusing on data and relationships over writing code. It's important to be able to turn it into code, but you should turn those into code, not turn code that works into a data model.

> The industry predominately rewards writing code, not designing software.

The sad part of this is that code is absolutely a side-effect of design and conception: without a reason and reasonable approach, code shouldn't exist. I really think that the relative austerity happening in industry right now will shine a light on poor design: if your solution to solving poorly understood spaces was to add yet another layer of indirection in the form of a new "microservice" as the problem space changed over time, it's probably more likely that there was an inherent poor underlying understanding of the domain and lack of planning extensibility in anticipation. Essentially, code (bodies) and compute aren't as "cheap" as they were when money was free, so front-loading intelligent design and actually thinking about your space and it's use-cases becomes more and more important.

> The industry predominately rewards writing code, not designing software.

This also stems from most of the code being written at any given moment being to solve problems we already solved before and doing or supporting mundane tasks that are completely uninteresting from the software design point of view.

> anemic objects

I have yet to come across a compelling reason why this is such a taboo. Most DDD functions I have seen also are just verbose getters and setters. Just because a domain entity can contain all the logic doesn't mean it should. For example, if I need to verify if a username exists already, then how do I go about doing that within a domain entity that "cannot" depend on the data access layer? People commonly recommend things like "domain services," which I find antithetical to DDD because now business logic is being spread into multiple areas.

I quite enjoy DDD as a philosophy, but I have the utmost disdain for "Tactical DDD" patterns. I think too many people think Domain-Driven Design == Domain-Driven Implementation. I try to build rich domains where appropriate, which is not in all projects, but I try not to get mired up in the lingo. Is "Name" type a value object or an aggregate root? I couldn't care less. I am more concerned about the bounded contexts than anything else. I will also admit that DDD can sometimes increase the complexity of an application while providing little gains. I wouldn't ever dare say it's a silver-bullet.

I will continue to use DDD going forward, but I can't help but shake this feeling that DDD is just an attempt at conveying, "See? OOP isn't so bad after all, right?" Of which, I am not sure it accomplishes that goal.

If you replace the Object-Oriented mechanism for encapsulation with some other mechanism for encapsulation then there's probably no reason for this taboo.

But in 99.999999% of real-world projects, anemic object-oriented code disregards encapsulation completely, and so business logic (the core reason why you're building the software in the first place) gets both duplicated and strewn randomly throughout the entire code project code.

Or in many cases, if the team disregards encapsulation at the type level then they're likely to also disregard encapsulation at the API/service/process level as well.

Ok, I see where you are coming from, and I agree. However, I would like to add that poorly implemented DDD can be just as awful.

With decades of exponential growth in CPU power, and memory size, and disk space, and network speed, and etc. - the penalties for shit design mostly went away, so you could usually get away with code monkeys writing crap as fast as they could bang on the keyboards.

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