http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/5335
We just tinker. That's all we can do to get stuff done.
He said that programming today is “More like science. You grab this piece of library and you poke at it. You write programs that poke it and see what it does. And you say, ‘Can I tweak it to do the thing I want?'”. The “analysis-by-synthesis” view of SICP — where you build a larger system out of smaller, simple parts — became irrelevant.
The reality is that the machines we write software for are complex, and trying to abstract it away and simplify it will introduce more abstractions that someone has to understand and deal with when they inevitably leak. It's not all bad, all this shit we're writing makes a lot of money.
Anecdotal, I had a coworker working on a new feature in a huge code base. I was trying to ignore the pseudocode planning they put on the board. After a moment of frustration I wrote down 6 conditionals that simplified what would become hundreds of new lines, to those 6 statement, and capture a few more corner cases they had not worked out yet.
Months later I got a green light on a total overhaul of the larger code base and we turned a massive code base into a fully automated and effectively bullet proof distributed system because I took the time to apply engineering principles to.the problem. The code wasn't always the most proper (I did things downright sinful) but the system was organized like an engineering project with interdependent subsystem instead of a rube Goldberg kludge of new.function on old. That overhaul too less time than any of the prior incremental feature updates prior.
Programmers hate it and rejected it.
To be fair, it does tend to create its own pathology. Instead of a layer cake made of congealed spaghetti, you tend to get over-engineering.
https://github.com/Hello-World-EE/Java-Hello-World-Enterpris...
Software engineering leads to software over-engineering because unlike in physical material engineering there is no capital or material cost to push back against complexity. You can just add things, and add things, and add things, forever, and it costs very little (a bit of RAM and CPU but that's cheap).
I have this weird hypothesis that part of why methodical "correct" software engineering fails is that it succeeds. It is able to manage complexity, which allows complexity to grow without bound. A mountain of ugly shit will start crashing in mysterious ways if it gets too complex, which has the virtue of limiting complexity.
A root problem is that programmers tend to add complexity, not remove it, and the incentive structure of the software business tends to encourage this. Each new bit of complexity or layer is something you could build a business around, or a feature you could sell. Nobody pays for simplicity. It has value, often massive value, but it's not intuitive. In what other domain would you pay more for the absence of something? This would make sense in software since simplicity is harder than complexity, but it feels weird and wrong.
Interesting thought that. Makes a lot of sense. Will remember it the next time I randomly have a train of thought about software complexity on the bus... Am I normal? does everyone here do that? Of course outside hackernews this is a hopeless question.
On a thread about software bloat and inefficiency, @josephg once speculated about an alternate universe where Moore's Law stopped decades ago. I've kept thinking about that. Unfortunately, I kept coming up with counterfactuals where important things like accessibility weren't as advanced or (relatively) widespread as they are in this world.
When I looked at SICP I saw one thing: an introduction to “thinking about programming” for people who will have to re-learn everything and will maybe use a few things here and there. The fundamentals matter but the application is the “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face” phase of actual learning. There are much better ways to go about studying and learning and I found SICP lacking, among other course work that I think is taught backwards and makes it hard to reason and apply.
Read “Great Programmers” by Bram Cohen. The wisdom is there, but it’s lost on people.
Just my 2c.