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Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

Depends on your definition of interesting?

I find improving established code of far more interest and reward than greenfield. Coming to understand what a person was thinking while building something is fascinating. My updates are tangible life improvements to real human beings. That interests me, at least.

Greenfield, I have the incredibly stressful job of making all the major architectural mistakes people will complain about for years to come. I'm not interested in that. There's also a much higher chance with greenfield that the product will just fail and no one will enjoy your work.

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I’m interested in finding the patterns and architecture that prevents those mistakes. I think I’ve found it already.

Check back in a couple years ;)

I did it. There’s always things that went wrong. But I found the way to minimize it.

You've found a way to correctly anticipate new user needs and new technologies years, even decades, in advance?

And you've found a way to completely forestall the non-technical demands that force non-ideal design choices?

You're sitting on a gold mine friend.

I should say not prevent it. But minimize it in the maximum possible way.

I am sitting on a gold mine. But I can’t prove it. That’s the problem with this stuff. The industry moves horizontally with each design such that nobody knows if say the current design trend was better than the last. We go better or we go worse and nobody knows if it actually was.

Maybe I am sitting on a gold mine. The problem is you’d never know about it. You’d never believe it. Because a proof isn’t possible.

So because it’s not provable you have no clue about any design whether one is better or one is worse and thus you disbelieve everything.

The overall question is how do you create a design or pattern that has maximum adaptability to anticipate any possible requirement change with minimal rewrites? Where you only swap in and swap out modules without changing structure?

I think I found the best possible way. But you won’t believe me.

I'm not the OP, but I'll say that I don't believe you, because you're telling me you have The Perfect Solution, without providing even a hint of what that solution is. If I was skeptical at first, I'm now certain you're selling smoke & mirrors until you provide any evidence at all you actually have an idea here.

I literally said I don’t have a perfect solution and that you wouldn’t believe me. What I have is the best possible solution based on available solutions that we know of. I found the best way.

I understand what you are saying. Obviously the type of development you do is a factor, as well as the way you and/or your team does development. I think others are looking for the one true solution, and you are saying that you have found the solution that works for you, given the way you develop and the constraints you deal with. At least that was my understanding of it. If you are doing embedded development, being thrown into a large front-end development project isn't going to use the same solution.

I have a solution for custom content management systems that usually makes it fairly easy for me to incorporate customer requests without needing to toss out my existing solution and start over. Almost a type of framework built over an existing open source CMS product. I maintain about 90 websites as the only backend developer, and have spent about 12 years now working through various versions of the software to custom tailor a solution that works for nearly all situations I have come across. I don't do front-end development any longer, but I was involved heavily at the beginning stages to make sure both the front-end and backend were flexible and broken apart into modules.

No im saying i have a general solution for everyone. The general part only applies to the part where are software projects are similar. The part where they are dissimilar it can’t apply. It’s impossible to generalize over distinctly different things but I found a solution that generalizes over what’s similar in the overwhelming majority of projects.

If you find a templates solution works for you then that is not a general solution. It’s better for you but you are hardening and becoming opinionated on certain details and that works for what you’re working on. My solution is a lower level pattern that is more general and less opinionated. For what you do it likely is only effective if you are required to drastically change an existing project while maintaining as much existing code as possible. The solution prevents a complete rewrite and allows you to modularly pull out what you don’t need and replace with the things you do need.

If you don’t need 90 percent of your project this pattern won’t prevent that. What this pattern allows is for you to actually pull out that 90 percent. Many projects that only need you to pull out say 30 to 40 percent of it actually end up with a full rewrite because the modules aren’t decoupled enough.

Apologies for the misunderstanding. Sounds interesting, but saying you can't prove it, and nobody will believe it is a tough sell. I guess I find it hard to believe like others, but you are talking in very abstract terms, and not being able to (or refusing to) give any kind of details sounds like you are trolling or don't realize that your solution does only work for what you work on. I'd say I could be proven wrong, but it seems you don't wish to do anything other than generalize. Good luck to you if you've actually found what you describe.

No need to apologize. I assure you I'm not trolling. Yeah I am talking in abstract terms because I don't really want to get into a debate on the topic. The reason is because any design style in this area is basically unprovable and leads to endless debates. There's no point.

I do have something that explains my pattern and serves as support for it. But it's no proof because such a thing isn't really provable. Anyway it's easier to let AI explain it. In the following conversation I basically ask chatGPT about this topic with very general questions while manipulating it as little as possible.

https://chatgpt.com/share/67b3ca4b-fc5c-8001-a072-342357b8a6...

chatGPT basically arrives at the same pattern I discovered. Where I cheated is when I started giving my own opinions on the several patterns chatGPT suggests and I hinted the LLM at the direction I wanted to go. Everything else is a very general question.

That being said, there are clearly other sets of general questions that can very well lead chatGPT to form alternate conclusions, but this one aligns with what I and many others have discovered.

Those are pretty well known FP oriented guidelines that many developers here on HN are familiar with. I don't think that your fear of not being believed is warranted.

HN is mostly not hardcore fp programmers. There’s a good amount of fp programmers but they are not the majority. Plenty of go and c++ lovers here and people who don’t understand the guidelines above.

The point is I don’t want to argue about it with someone who doesn’t get it.

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