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Comment by wanderingmind | Hacker News Reader

One thing that I feel that is discussed less is, what are the high level constraints and levers that can be set to enable a group of programmers to become a better programmers. For example, how much impact does architecture have? bug tracing, choice of language, tools. People handwave and say that one is better than another because of <reason 1>, <reason 2>, but to be able to explain how each of this choice impacts the code in a semi-rigorous way by explaining all the way of how it impacts individual code components and their interaction (as a graph or a tree) would be immensely helpful. If anyone knows of resources like that, please let us know

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The objective is always to attain some kind of synergy between the business logic and, as others have said, algorithm simplicity. The best way to go about it is to start from the chosen language/environment/library, and build out a DSL that can express the business rules. That's the basic premise of DDD, but where all this got complicated is splitting into contexts and the translation between their boundary.

I believe programmers should learn a bit about programming language theory, mostly the bits about what is a language. Then how to recognize the things behind the labels, and how they morph (either from an operation or from a translation between contexts). Then it's a matter of using the knowledge to move from the environment to a DSL that can express the business rules.

Architecture is the draft for the above, defining the starting point and a direction. And design is where you start to make decisions following the plan. For someone that have an idea of the destination, they can judge both.

I think we're still at the stage of "this team lead makes shit happen" rather than "this strategy makes shit happen," with a lot of the nuances being fuzzy and/or wrong.

Tossing out a few observations:

1. People make mistakes. Your strategy needs to account for that (resilient runtime, heavy type-checking, convenient and often-used REPL, etc).

2. Above a certain project size, nobody remembers everything. Your strategy needs to account for that (excellent multifaceted documentation, disallow long-range interactions in your code, etc).

3. Dependencies have a vastly higher cost than you expect, even in the short term. Plan for that (vendor more things, in-house more things, allocate resources to dependency management, cut scope, etc).

I could go on. The core point is that certain properties of projects are "plainly" true to most people who have been around any length of time. I don't think we're yet at a point where we can often predict anything meaningful about some specific new technology, but a mental framework of "this succeeded/failed _because_ of {xyz}" helps tremendously in figuring out if/how that new idea will fit into your current workplace.

If only there was a clear answer to this. Software engineering, as it has appeared to me, has always seemed to evolve with opinions moreso than tangible improvements. That being said, some practices are almost universally agreed to lead to better code, like defensive programming (proving your assertions relating to program conditions in the actual code), uniform documentation, and, in general, taking your time in implementing structures that will be used throughout the codebase. Formalizing your logic in proofs can be one part of that.

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