Nonreligious Articles of Belief
Yeah, this is another good thing to get out of the system. As with everything I say, it should be looked at as more tentative than absolute, even when formulated in a creed-y manner. I've thought about these things for a long time, and I believe writing this does me good, mentally.
So, I hereby present: six tentative beliefs of mine. A short version of, and perhaps a table of contents for, the longer version that is 70% done. I just wanted a short version out now.
I believe useful estimation is impossible in software development. (Of course 'estimation' with no further qualification is possible, duh...)
I believe interfaces types are needed to scale well, and 'distribute' well. At least type-'consciousness' is needed, but actual formal types in languages are better, because they can be processed by machines.
I believe organizing code into features or modules is superior to the common layered architecture default.
I believe polyglot programming is really difficult, a really big risk. Something to avoid, the more the languages differ. And one has to consider incongruent data types and gaps in tooling more than just different syntax.
I believe databases as entities separate from the application is one of the things that makes software development terrible. Also, see polyglottism.
I believe optimization (I mean that thing that compilers or query engines do for us) is kind of useless because it is unpredictable, unreliable.
So, in closing; I believe that some of the common thinking and so-called best practices make development projects not scale well, make code less understandable, make tooling harder, make analysis harder. And make me depressed. When in contact with them. And that is one of the reasons for this article.
Yeah, this is another good thing to get out of the system. As with everything I say, it should be looked at as more tentative than absolute, even when formulated in a creed-y manner. I've thought about these things for a long time, and I believe writing this does me good, mentally.
So, I hereby present: six tentative beliefs of mine. A short version of, and perhaps a table of contents for, the longer version that is 70% done. I just wanted a short version out now.
I believe useful estimation is impossible in software development. (Of course 'estimation' with no further qualification is possible, duh...)
I believe interfaces types are needed to scale well, and 'distribute' well. At least type-'consciousness' is needed, but actual formal types in languages are better, because they can be processed by machines.
I believe organizing code into features or modules is superior to the common layered architecture default.
I believe polyglot programming is really difficult, a really big risk. Something to avoid, the more the languages differ. And one has to consider incongruent data types and gaps in tooling more than just different syntax.
I believe databases as entities separate from the application is one of the things that makes software development terrible. Also, see polyglottism.
I believe optimization (I mean that thing that compilers or query engines do for us) is kind of useless because it is unpredictable, unreliable.
So, in closing; I believe that some of the common thinking and so-called best practices make development projects not scale well, make code less understandable, make tooling harder, make analysis harder. And make me depressed. When in contact with them. And that is one of the reasons for this article.
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