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0 pointsibdknox6y ago0 comments

I might strengthen your argument even more and say it's largely a non-technical problem. We have had the tools necessary to build good software for a long time. As others have pointed out, I think a lot of this comes down to incentives and the fact that no one has demonstrated the tradeoff in a compelling way so far.

I find it really interesting that no one in the future of programming/coding community has been able to really articulate or demonstrate what an "ideal" version of software engineering would be like. What would the perfect project look like both socially and technically? What would I gain and what would I give up to have that? Can you demonstrate it beyond the handpicked examples you'll start with? We definitely didn't get there.

It's much harder to create a clear narrative around the social aspects of engineering, but it's not impossible - we weren't talking about agile 20 years ago. The question is can we come up with a complete system that resonates enough with people to actually push behavior change through? Solving that is very different than building the next great language or framework. It requires starting a movement and capturing a belief that the community has in some actionable form.

I've been thinking a lot about all of this since we closed down Eve. I've also been working on a few things. :)

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Tossrock6y ago

I'll take this opportunity to appreciate C# in VS as a counterexample to the article. Fast as hell (sub-second compile times for a moderately large project on my 2011 vintage 2500k), extremely stable, productive, and aesthetically pleasing. So, thanks.

jiggawatts6y ago

It's very hard for me to get away from C# because it's just so crazy productive. The tooling is fanstastic and the runtime performance is more than good enough.

One thing I found was that surprisingly the C# code I write outperforms the C++ code I used to write at equal development times.

I was good at C++, but the language has so many footguns and in general is so slow to develop in that I would stick to "simple" and straightforward solutions. I avoided multi-threading like the plague because it was just so hard to get right.

Meanwhile in C# it's just so easy to sprinkle a little bit of multithreading into almost any application (even command-line tools) that I do it "just because". Even if the single-threaded performance is not-so-great, the end result is often much better.

Similarly, it's easy to apply complex algorithms or switch between a few variants until something works well. In C++ or even Rust, the strict ownership semantics makes some algorithm changes require wholesale changes to the rest of the program, making this kind of experimentation a no-go.

The thing that blows my mind is the "modern" approach to programming that seems to be mostly young people pretending that Java or C# just don't exist.

Have you seen what JavaScript and Python people call "easy?" I saw a page describing a REST API based on JSON where they basically had thousands of functions with no documentation, no schema, and no typed return values. It was all "Just look at what the website JS does and reverse engineer it! It's so easy!"

I was flabbergasted. In Visual Studio I can literally just paste a WSDL URL into a form and it'll auto-generate a 100K-line client with async methods and strongly-typed parameters and return values in like... a second. Ditto for Linq-2-SQL or similar frameworks.

iamwil6y ago

I've also been lurking on the FoC community, and hadn't seen much on an articulation on the social and incentive structures that produce software. Do you think they'd be receptive to it?

And by "social and inventive structures", I'm assuming you're talking about change on the order of how open source software or agile development changed how we develop software?

While agile did address how to do software in an environment for changing requirements and limited time, we don't currently have anything that addresses an attention to speed of software, building solid foundations, and incentives to maintain software.

What would a complete system encompass that's currently missing in your mind?

aspaceman6y ago

This is very much a social and political problem. Will be interesting to see if us technical folks can solve it.

isodude6y ago

I think you will see great change if you were to look at the personalities around one opportunity.

Because it's never problems really, it's perceived that way though.

A certain challange needs a specific set of personalities to solve it. That's the real puzzle.

Great engineers will never be able to solve things properly unlessed given the chance by those who control the surroundings.

We seek how we should develop, what method should be used, is it agile or is it lean? But maybe the problem starts earlier and focusing on exactly what methods and tools to use we miss out on the most simplest solution even beginners can see.

For example I am an architect, I tend to not touch the economics in a project. It's better fitted for other persons.

While not having read much about team based development I do want to be directed to well read literature about it. Maybe it's better called social programming, just another label of what we really do.

The one I miss the most at work is my wife. She clearly is the best reverse of me and makes me perform 1000x better. I find that very funny since she does not care about IT at all.

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