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Big Ball Of Mud Development Model
Lightborn writes: "The Big Ball of Mud Development Model examines exactly why so many projects (software and otherwise) end up looking like a bowl of spaghetti. A good list of things not to do when developing a project."
Hmm, from what I have seen, there is some good, some bad, and some ugly... just like in the commercial world. The only difference is that we get the src code, so we can see how bad it is.
I am not saying we shouldn't encourage higher standards in OSS, just that commercial code is not necessarily any better.
--Rob
This is a perfect example of why some code is crappy. One thing that always bothers me about Linux code in general is the lack of proper documentation. Sure, someone can say "read the f**king code, but in reality, it is usually much easier, even for experienced programmers, to have code that is well documented. If nothing else, it makes searching the code much easier.
In all of the commercial settings I have worked in, we always document our code. Each function is required to have a comment describing its function.
As a highly experienced developer of device drivers, embedded code, and other low-level code, the documentation is a big plus. Let's face it, computer code was designed to be parsed and read by computers, not human beings. One person's coding style may be hard to understand by even an experienced programmer.
The Linux kernel code is improving in this respect.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Actually it's not an OSS problem. Bad software is generally caused by:
1) Bad initial design,
2) Bad/Inexperienced programmers,
3) Bad management.
OSS suffers from the first two, but peer review tends to weed out bad programmers pretty fast (at least in larger projects, less so in smaller ones).
Commercial software suffers from all three. The pressure from management to meet some imaginary 'deadline' (often invented after two many beers during an 'important meeting') means software goes out barely tested if at all. In 10 years as a programmer I've never seen a program get more than an hours testing before it got sent out.
Tony
All these causes of "bad" code are valid, but by far, in my limited experience, the by far largest cause of "bad" code in at least closed source software is tight deadlines.
Programs never have static requirements. They are always changing. Features are always being added / changed. Everyone understands this (mgmt / engineering). However, the orignal design for the program, no matter how perfect it may be, becomes inadequate. Yes, if the architect / designer is good, the program is proof against some feature additions. But not all feature additions fit seamlessly into any good design. The program has to be redesigned to add this feature "correctly". Or it can be hacked in. To redesign takes considerable amounts of time.
Now what happens if you add constant severe time pressure into the equation.
The rest of the equation is left for the reader to solve.
Well, maybe I was a bit too cynical. I have no doubt that the programmers will do everything possible to make sure their software doesn't kill any astronauts, programmers being decent human beings in general. However, I was actually referring to the management level, where there is not this level of everyday social interaction with the astronauts. I'm sure nobody wants to see another tragic accident happening again, it's just that there is an ethical aspect and an economical aspect to this, and they both play a part in it.
MSN 8: Now Microsoft even has bugs in their ad campaigns.
exactly... people who want something that works, should use something that's LABELLED as working.
Hence, if you want a functional linux system, use 2.2.x, not 2.3.x
I'm sure things tend to break in FreeBSD-CURRENT as much as they do in Linux 2.(odd)
Computer science education should focus on teaching good design skills so we turn out programmers and not code monkeys.
This is exactly right. Computer science students need to know the underlying theory, and learning the underlying theory certainly does make mastering a new language is practically a matter of learning syntax and finding the quirks.
One way to start is by teaching about lambda calculi, and progressively working up to functional programming, and finally to object-oriented programming
This is completely wrong. Potentially good students who are not completely dedicated will lose interest for lack of immediate gratification. Those who are dedicated will take the time to learn a language themselves with little or no guidance, creating and compounding the same problem that this solution tries to avoid.
I'm all for a stronger and earlier emphasis on theory, but at least one programming language should be taught first as a concrete base. When the theory classes came around, concrete ideas will already be in students minds ready to click with the abstractions taught in the classroom. I'm sure it could work the other way around, but I don't know how many students will stay around to find out.
If you can read this, then I forgot to check "Post Anonymously".
IP is already used internally. There is no reason to integrate it into MSDEV; it has its own editor, compiler, and debuger. Its editor is fundamentally different from MSDEV text based environment. Yes, 2-3 years if a fair estimate, despite the begining of the productions.
Yes, it really blows -- no competitors in sight, MS will have the monopoly on new development paradigm and everyone will bitch again.
You are, of course, correct. However, OSS doesnt suffer as much as the closed source community from time constraints. Sure, OSS maintainers are harrassed by users for new versions and bug fixes, but in general, the maintainer's livelihood doesn't depend on releasing a new version. This gives OSS, in it's current form, a much bigger chance to produce better maintained code that most closed source software, as long as the oportunity to do so is utilized.
;)
Mind you, maintainers will probably have to put up with a lot of crap from users while they reorganize and reimpliment
Open source is massively contributing to better source, if it were only because more students now not only get the opportunity to read real-life code.
Even stronger, learning to read code has become more important than churning out vast amounts by yourself.
Inadvertedly, open source addresses a serious flaw in computer science education: the fact that students should, in the first place, learn to read, use, alter and inspire themselves from existing bodies of code, instead of churning out unrealisticly small mickey mouse examples.
Well-written code reads like poetry.
Subject line says it.
Can we be honest? The vast majority of it is complete crap, developed by amateurs with absolutely no clue how develop to professional standards.
I've only been working in the industry for a couple of years, and have interned at two companies and worked fulltime for a third. The code there was written by 'professionals' (in the sense that writing this code was people's professions) and has been varying degrees of ugly. Not always hideous, rarely fantastic.
I think that the Open source process encourages clean code more than closed source development, for two reasons. 1) You don't want to show the world your ugly dumb code, 2) the world has the chance to clean up your ugly dumb code, if it wants.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
is a strong maintainer. A maintainer that rejects bad patches with extreme predjudice.
Ever read Linus' posts to Linux-Kernel? He is exactly the sort of maintainer, that calls out programmers that repeatedly submit incorrect or kludgey patches, and plants a boot up their backside right in front of everyone.
Read Linus, and you'll see he has a clear vision as to how the linux-kernel is supposed to work -- not just in a design capacity, but with an eye towards maintainability.
As Linus once told one of the GGI loonies: "the kernel isnt stable because it's a kernel, it's stable because I dont listen to people like you"
Oh, for sure. I'm not debating that... there are a lot of good points in there that I believe in. I think you misconstrued my entire post as meaning something more than it does -- it was really just an off-the-cuff reply to the following statements, in particular:
The pressure from management to meet some imaginary 'deadline' (often invented after two many beers during an 'important meeting') means software goes out barely tested if at all. In 10 years as a programmer I've never seen a program get more than an hours testing before it got sent out.
--
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
However, I have been using pair programming for about 2.5 years now, but only for hobby coding, and I have two things to say about it.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
It costs $1000/line.
Remember the very first launch? Main engine shutdown due to a software snafu.
It takes 8 months of training on the shuttle software to avoid killing yourself (this is a direct quote from a former shuttle commander). The originally-designed interlocks you would expect in software were thrown out because it wouldn't fit.
If the predicted launch winds vary by more than +-5 knots or +-20degrees, they have to scrub the launch - why? The shuttle software can only take a limited number of wind parameters and it takes 12 (or 24, I forget) hours to rebuild the configuration if it changes.
It requires the largest standing army of programmers to maintain of any 400K line program ever written. The only reason it works at all is they test, and retest, and retest the living daylights out of it, NOT because they designed it well.
I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just. --Thomas Jefferson
The Big Ball of Mud website at www.laputan.org doesn't seem to be responding. I get the first page but trying to d/l any of the document formats is futile. Their web server seems to be a Big Ball of Bugs. ./ effect or simply a weekend fallover with no one around to reboot?
The vast majority *is* crap. But the stuff that is important, libc, the Linux kernel, GCC etc. isn't.
:)
From the quite limited time I've spent looking at kernel code, it seems pretty good (modular, clean, etc). I'm glad as I may end up writing device drivers sometime this summer.
I've never looked at glibc so I can't comment (I've heard libc5 was pretty bad though, which is one of the reasons for the switch to glibc). GCC, OTOH, is pretty horrible. I think the problem is that it was designed to handle K&R C, then hacked on to support ANSI C, then C++, ObjC, Fortran, and now who-knows-what-else (IIRC there are Pascal and Ada versions too, just not in the main tree yet). But for whatever reason GCC is not at all pretty. It's odd that nobody else (including the *BSD people) have done work on a free C/C++/ObjC compiler: the only other C compiler I could find on freshmeat is lcc, which is only for non-commercial use, and only does ANSI C.
I've finally adopted a very game-programmer oriented philosophy towards development. Code should be written so that it is the specification, with appropriate inline comments documenting it and really clear variable names. Programmers should be extremely vigilant, and continuously roam their own code making sure that it actually reflects the current state of assumptions about the system. Whenever a change is made to the system, anything remotely affected should be proactively rewritten to reflect the change. This is pretty much how Abrash describes himself and Carmack working on Doom and Quake, and it is really successful. You keep performance up, stay in touch with your code, and never accumulate cruft. Bugs are immediately ferreted out and the programmer must never fear diving into code to tackle a big cleanup job, and can never allow pieces of code to exist that she (or he) doesn't understand.
Of course, you need massive automated tests to make sure your rewrites don't screw anything up. Designs must be extremely abstraction oriented, with a close eye to strong interfaces and bootstrapping, otherwise you will end up with so much code that it is impossible to manage the continual cleaning. And you need really dedicated programmers.
When I look at the Doom and Quake source, and the code that my own dev. team has produced, I see that the results are worthwhile. Each routine is beautifully crafted and works flawlessly. The codebase is a fraction of the size you would expect because so much effort has been put into doing everything the right way and eliminating broken or excessive code. And no bugs...
magic
Are you sure?
I'm not trolling, I'm deeply interested in OS & OSS stuff, and I've been going through the kernel a lot lately. I'll admit that all of the kernel code I've seen seems pretty damn solid , but as I understand it the network stuff is total spaghetti.
Don't get me wrong - linux networking support is brilliant, but the code wasn't designed with multiprocessor in mind (this is how NT beat Linux on those high publicity MS funded tests a while back). Apparently the reason no one has fixed the TCP/IP stack to multiproc better is that the code is such a mess.
Linux may be good, but that doesn't mean the code is well written from a maintainance perspective.
disclaimer: I haven't look at the net stuff yet myself, and don't know if this is true or not - but you can see the point I'm making :-)
I've done a quick look at the latest version of glibc. It looks pretty well thought out (everything cleanly seperated by architecture with default backups should a feature not exist) but I only spent 10 minutes on it so I really can't comment much.
I've spent about 4 hours studying the bison parser in GCC. (I'm working on a very simple compiler as part of another project, Corporate Raiders) While I've never made a compiler, or really any advanced programming before, I still could follow the general gist of how the parser worked, enough that I was able to use some of the way it worked in my compiler.
I've never seen GCC crash in all the time I've used it. If it's a mess then it sure is well working mess!
First note that most kernels, Linux espessially, use lots of goto's for performence reasons.
Secondly the Linux networking code has been completely rewritten 2 or 3 times now. If it's spaghetti it's very quickly eaten spaghetti. :)
Microsoft bashing aside, how do we as the technical experts deal with someone without clue making a decision that heavily influences the effectiveness of a project? My biggest challenge has been finding the most appropriate and professional way to say "That would be stupid". Sometimes there's no option to speak out, indicating that its time to move on. :)
s/[BW]ill(y|iam)?( H\.?)?( G(ate|8)(s|z))?(,? ?v?(III|3)(\.\D)?)?/Girly-man/gi
I think this is an unfair generalisation. The vast majority of code I work with is clean, well-designed, and adheres to one of the style and coding standards out there. That includes the kernel sources, Glib, Gtk+, the Gnome libs, python, Perl, and loads of others.
If you mean that the vast majority of small applications are complete crap, you could be right. But don't knock the single programmer who need to scratch an itch. If enough people are interested in his or her project, they'll help - including design and style improvements and suggestions.
The OSS community needs to establish some quality standards. Linux code is relatively new, but this is going to bite everyone in the butt as the code gets modified more and more, and software rot starts to rear its ugly head.
Seems to be doing just fine so far - the OSS community is pretty aggressive about coding standards already.
Mark my words: Unless coding standards get real important soon, OSS is going to collapse under its own weight. "As long as it works" is not good enough.
Whereas of course closed-source software is bound to survive since all development houses rigidly enforce coding standards?
Bollocks. Been there, done that, shipped it because it compiled. In the bazaar model and peer review style of the OSS world, you can't get away with crappy code or bad design for very long. If your project's well designed, maintainable, useful and easy to read as well as being robust, it will survive. If not, then you can't get away with shipping only binaries to some poor customer.
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
The world contains both ARTISTS and CRAFTSMEN. An artist will explore limits, see what breaks, and come up with new metaphors for work.
A craftsman will produce something that can be predicted to work, to a predictable schedule. It won't get written up in the magazines, but it will work.
What society needs is to find a way to finance the artists while not letting them near anything that we intend to ship. In the historical past, this was handled via corporate thinktanks like Bell Labs or Xerox PARC or whereever IBM stashed their official "fellows".
Once the bean counters slashed these "artistic" (and apparently unprofitable) quarantines, the partly-baked ideas now have to be developed within real projects.
My dichotomy artist/craftsman can also be expressed as scientist/engineer, or probably a dozen other expressions in different fields.
The address given is really slow...
Try:
http://users.soltec.net/~foote
-Donald
An OO language requires that I think about aggregating related attributes (objects), a restricted set of operations that can be applied to those (methods), and the relationships between objects of similar and dissimilar types. Encapsulation of the actual data and use of a restricted set of operations to manipulate them helps get better results since it's harder to "cheat" in the sense of reaching across and tweaking some value in an unrelated structure, so you have a better chance that your objects' collective state satisfies all the necessary invariants after an operation. Good programmers have always done these things even without OO languages, although it tends to involve a lot of personal discipline.
Rigorous enforcement of these principles by the language/compiler makes other things possible. Code reuse in the small by inheritance or delegation (depending on whose model you like), although very little of what I work on seems to benefit from inheritance. Code reuse on a larger scale by components. And it's certainly easier to deal with things like
this.action(parms)
than it is to handle a whole bunch of things like
action_class(this, a)
action_class2(this, a, b)
action_class3(this, a, b, c)
and so on. Late binding allows more nice stuff than early binding, at the cost of some efficiency, etc.
I count all of this stuff as "thinking about data" and believe that an OO language requires that you spend more time on it. You appear to think that an OO lanuage gives you something different. Care to expand on that a bit?
well..its the challenge of the thing. i hope you took the job. :) size of the box is fairly easy with a couple of cameras (write in C - all those tight loops help) and marking on the floor. dense packing algorithms are out there to fit boxes into other boxes and labels can be read with a barcode scanner mounted nearby - you'll get an ascii char stream.
Yep. However, I read some years ago that the Space Shuttle code costs $1000 per source line to develop (for the whole shebang, analysis, design, implementation, testing, maintenance, documentation, etc.) That's one thousand dollars per line (if I got paid that much, I'd be long retired :-). This only applies to manned missions though, software for unmanned missions costs about $100 per SLOC.
[cynical] I fear this is not because they value human life so much, it's more that loss of human life leads to huge costs in terms of publicity, scrutiny, congressional investigations, freezing of funding, halting of programs, etc. The Challenger tragedy cost far more than the $2 billion that the spacecraft costed, the halting of the launches and the redesign of the shuttle was far more expensive.[/cynical]
Anyway, as I should not have to point out, testing and bug finding is hampered by the law of diminishing returns. It is extremely costly to get the last 1% of the bugs out of the software. In the case of NASA and the space shuttle, there is an economic incentive to hunt down the last of the bugs. In the case of commercial software, stuff riddled with bugs is released because the cost of delaying the release outweighs the cost of leaving bugs in (dare I say that it often makes economic sense to leave bugs in? Just release the bug fixes as an upgrade...).
Anyhow, I think that Open Source has an advantage over commercial software in the sense that the developer(s) are motivated by something else than a paycheck. It is often a sense of pride that makes them strive for clean, bug-free code. Ever notice that the quality of software seems proportional to the inverse of the cost? I'm only half joking here....
MSN 8: Now Microsoft even has bugs in their ad campaigns.
... about 30 minutes to 1 hour ...
--
If code was hard to write, it should be hard to read
yep. im going off to a trade show next week..but should be back. trade shows are a pain - specially when stuff breaks at the last minute. spent the last week hacking on the last minute bug fixes - ugh.
I disagree. There is crap open-source stuff out there, but overall the coding standard is really not too bad, and some is excellent. The important stuff tends towards the excellent (at least from my experience).
By contrast, go and have a play with arbitrary pieces of Windows shareware . . .
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I'm really glad to see this. In my experience, the great flaw in the OSS model is the quality of the code. Can we be honest? The vast majority of it is complete crap, developed by amateurs with absolutely no clue how develop to professional standards.
The OSS community needs to establish some quality standards. Linux code is relatively new, but this is going to bite everyone in the butt as the code gets modified more and more, and software rot starts to rear its ugly head.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of OSS developers are not very old (
Mark my words: Unless coding standards get real important soon, OSS is going to collapse under its own weight. "As long as it works" is not good enough.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
12, 13 and 14 hour days are logged to make damn sure the spec is rock solid and ready to take over the world. Then it happened. The kind of comment that sounds like fingernails down the chalk board. The new VP (and CEOs son) stands up in the back of the room ans says:
" Hey! let's partner with Microsoft"
___
I screwed up and used a bad character. I resubmitted another version. Please make this one go away.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I always thought it was just that in any project (programming or otherwise) there are always at least a few people with poor [programming] habits. This hurts the whole project
We have it on paper, we have the "correct" ideas of how a software project should be (un)organized.
//FIXME's where we don't want/have time/know how to fix something.
:)
.sig
With the duct-taped style we solve problems when we find them and put
Aaaahhh, sure feels nice to know that we were right all along.
This is somewhat similar to the softwear engineering methodology known as "Extreme Programming"
One of the main tenents of Extreme Programming is constant refactoring (ie, you see something that could be done better another way, you fix it straight away)
The other main point of extreme programming are: Always do the simplest thing that will work, and have proper, automatic test suites to constantly test your work.
Have a look at The Extreme Programming Web Site to learn more.
Whoa! That's amazing -- I code in an almost identical fashion. I'd never realized it before. I've been asked "how" I code in the past, and never really been able to come up with a satisfactory answer. But you hit the nail right on the head -- that's exactly the way I code.
It's kind of interesting, too, that I also come from an English (ie: human language) writing background.
--
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
(For those of you hailing from Knoxville, check out this cool pulp detective story from MetroPulse: Best of Knoxville Awards (alternate universe version). Good perspectives related to this in the final chapter. :)
"Never argue with an idiot. Their drag you down to their level, and then beat you with experience." --Anonymous
Basically making it known that if things are done the 'wrong' way as suggested, I take no responsibility for the design descision.
Blar.
For a long time I couldn't figure out why others had such a hard time fixing bugs and changing their programs, while I could do it without any problems (no I'm not trying to be arrogant or pretentious).
Then a coworker made this remark: "Ray how can you write such well-organized code in one pass?" At first I couldn't understand what she was talking about, after all doesn't everybody constantly review their code? Doesn't everybody constantly rearrange functions and classes, rename variables, redefine protocols? Apparently not.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks to me like most programmers write something once then spend the rest of the time trying to get that working. They never go back and rewrite the code, they just keep adding fixes to it. How can this ever work smoothly?
I've also seen and heard a lot about processes to make a program, or anything else, come out right the first time. I don't get that either! To me, the only objective when writing programs is to make it easy to change. Period. If it's easy change, it's easy to fix bugs, it's easy to enhance, and it's easy to rearrange and redesign with hindsight.
If you want to have a good time programming, do yourself a favour: learn the tools to make global changes to your code quickly, then spend a _lot_ of effort rearranging your code and renaming things as your program evolves.
After a while, you'll earn the repect of the people who you work for and you won't be a jr jr developer for long.
___
I think when BBoM says:
:-). Now consider open source. The success of open source is directly related to whether you find good architects to write the code. The difficulties in marketing open source are due to its greatest virtue, not having managers and strict time schedules to keep. However, the managers are needed to make the software work in commercial setting. Now, how to solve the software crisis then? Well, you can't give all the answers in one slashdot posting, now can you?
"[Foote&Yoder 1998a] went so far as to observe that inscrutable code, in fact, have a survival advantage over good code, by virtue of being difficult to comprehend and change."
This must be the reason for all the crap code in the world. But it also assumes _great_ code does not exist. Great code probably has even better survival advantage, by virtue of not needing any change. I once thought that all code needed to change, if the requirements for that portion of code change. But that is *not* true, great code does not need to change, even after your requirements change. Great code may be phased out of use after significant changes in requirements, but it does not need to change.
Now then the Dilbert-style managers enter the picture, and all hope is lost. They take the great code, look at how long it has taken to develop the thing, and decide it must be crap since the last project used a lot of time to develop and enhance it. Then they discard it and REWRITE it in the inscrutable way.
Then someone says software is not doomed to failure. How many organisations do you know that had both the great management and the great architects?
Now, the *obvious* solution is to get rid of managers. Then you have already solved half the problem, and only need to find good architects.
-- Esa Pulkkinen
From a programmer's point of view, the moment you can write a new routine or program perfectly in the first try, then something is wrong.
You are writing it perfectly because you can probably do it in your sleep. It's boring code, versions of which you've written a thousand times before. You learn by making mistakes and if you are making mistakes in your code (and fixing them) , then you are learning something.
Perfectly crafted programs are signs that you are not learning anything new, just executing a known pattern and dying of boredom in the process.
Computer science education should focus on teaching good design skills so we turn out programmers and not code monkeys.
;-]
What's wrong with Code Monkeys?
I'm all for a stronger and earlier emphasis on theory, but at least one programming language should be taught first as a concrete base.
I totally agree. We've got to learn to walk before we find out how to get to the store...
I'll have you know that output-oriented programming was one of my required courses. (Cranked out a whole lot of psudo-code in the process.) It by nature emphasized loop and module organization, and a whole lot of systematic steps with applied Keep It Simple, Stupid.
The trumpets blair, the banner is unfurled, the cry goes out: CORRECT BY DESIGN!
Any student with enough intelligence to actually learn coding and get the job, is then capable of learning the principles and strategies to do this stuff right, and not necessarily BEFORE they learn to code... It just needs to be distilled into usable ideas and strategies, and usable texts - something less obtuse than the usual fare. Dare I ask - written with the clarity of a Dummies'© book. (gasp!)
Now to really reveal my lack of experience: I read as much the article as I could get to load (darn that Slashdot effect) and got as far as the Reconstruction section.
What I didn't get from the article was many examples that were specific enough to glean useful strategies that I can take into my own projects.
The Mudball was pretty obvious, your standard hack taken to the inevitable conclusion. (It seems to me the solution is to toss the concept of global variables and string your modules hierarchically. Comment?)
I got the Reconstruction, Quarantine, and Growth ideas pretty well, but the Sheering idea completly escaped me. I mean, I understand it as a concept (organizing data and code according to rate of change), and whole-heartedly agree with it, but I can't picture any example of it well enough to be able to apply it. Suggestions?
TangoChaz
--------------------
TangoChaz
--------------------
Wise men talk because they have something to say, fools because the
Bravo! I bitch and moan all the time about all these wannabe geeks! The problem as well is that most of them are so good at bullshitting their way into good positions that from a CV perspective it is getting harder and harder to distinguish between the "could code before i could walk" hard core and the "Microsoft S/W is soooo good, I wish I could suck BG's c**k" losers, who do treat it as just another job, and have no inherent talent.
Anway, enough ranting!
faichai
...code until it feels too messy, go back, rework, continue to code anew, get stuck, etc :-) and BTW this process has a name - people call it refactoring
I have no idea whether others code in a similar fashion or not.
Don't worry, you are not alone
I'm trying to convince my manager that this is the right approach for us but with little success.
I work for a small software house with just six developers on two main projects. What I see happening though is emergance of a structure that closely follows the XP guidelines. Our key developer left last month and left us with well over half a million lines of code to maintain and extend.
Naturally the first outcome was an outbreak of panic (particularly among the management) but us programmers didn't have time for lamenting. What happened though is that once we lost our mastermind of coding and had to rely on ourselves even with the most critical parts of the system people started sharing knowledge much more freely and the environment became extremely productive. I found myself often pairing with other developers to help them understand some parts of the code and vice versa.
It seems that with the old state of things (one developer churning out masses of code and the rest almost idle) while it felt comfortable it left many people fearing that they can't perform on their own (one of my colleagues wanted to resign straight away as soon as she learned that the guru is leaving).
The moral is that what pair programming prescribes turned out to be our life jacket and ultimately boosted the productivity of people who were previously intimidated by the presence of the 'main man'.
Personally I find coding in pairs a brilliant idea. I find myself producing much higher quality code when I have someone looking at what I'm typing. The bugs are fewer and more people know what's going on in the system. It works much better than peer reviews and documentation projects that we had foisted upon us by the management. It's not the official company policy but we do it anyway. For us XP works (or at least the parts we adopted).
Who is the bigger fool? The fool who demands the impossible or the fool who comes in on weekends to do it?
(now if you'll pardon me, I'm just on my way in to work... literally...)
This puts the research burdon on the person making the request. It also (hopefully) allows him to learn a few things during his quest to document his brain-dead demands thus lowering the likehood that we, as a company, have to waist time on a similar problem in the future.
___
Dun dun dun. Crash course in Managing Software(and hardware) Development. There are millions of links out there. So here's an introduction so people know what to look for. Remember, there is no magical model that automatically works!
e sting)->(Product life)
* -*(testing)->(product life)*[arrows back to design and analysis]
f ) -- more detail (http://www.incose.org/rwg/97panel/97 panel.html) - etc - (http://www.kingst on.ac.uk/~ma_s435/personal/work/CO1032B/tools_5/)
---
This is why you learn different management in software development models, because there is no one model that suits everyone. There are generally held principles that anyone can come to, but they aren't solutions that you can work out by common sense.
Here are some general statements:
"Software development is multi-dimensional."
OK, duh.
"Developers pay attention to what they are measured on"
OK, that makes sense. People _respect_ what management _inspects_.
"Some performance dimensions in software may be in conflict"
Makes sense, although a little more complex. (e.g., min memory, min SLOC vs. min effort and max user satisfaction vs max maintainability...)
Objectives in managing software development:
* define the process by which projects are conceived approved, and delivered
* define the guidelines and standards that are used by architects, developers and managers who will develop software
* define the mechanisms used to deliver the software to the marketplace
* general models to develop specific models in particular niche's such as "shrink wrapped" or "web based" or "b2b" or "b2c" or "OEM" etc
* define who is involved (e.g., product management, project management, development, technical writers, human factors/ui, localization etc) and their roles and their tasks.
* Specifications documents should follow these definitions and management models such as that for cost estimation (e.g., COCOMO, other models).
* once tasks are defined, you can help employees do what they are supposed to and evaluate them for future changes to development model
Interesting links:
a n article
The CMU software engineering institute
more
Defense system management college introduction to project management
wooha lots of links.
needed skepticism regarding empirical analysis with models!!!
"Commercial software models"
Example of cost estimation in use (findings from them at least):
http://www.ll.mit.edu/llrassp/jca/mcmb w.html
_Development models_ include (*== > in double sided->):
The incremental model;
AKA. The market model. Often dictated by management and generally follows QA builds.
(P.1)()()()()(1.0)()()()...(2.0)..
The evolutionary model;
AKA. The pseudo academic model
(Product Idea)*-*(Prototype)->(Clean Code)->(test and rinse)->(evolve)->(repeat)
The spiral model:
This model makes you ask the question as to the value of functionality and what process one would take in implementation.
(Kernel)->(Kernel+key or riskiest functionality)->(kernel+key+less troublesome components)->(K.+key+LTC+Less troublesome functionality)
Waterfall Model:
Intent:
(Product Idea)->(Analysis)->(Design)->(Implementation)->(t
Reality:
(PI)*-*(Analsysis)->(design)*-*(implementation)
Rapid Prototype model:
(product idea)->(prototype & analysis & design)->(implementation)->(testing)->(product life)
Common misuse:
(Product Idea)->(Prototype)->(More Code)->(Test)->(release)
etc, and hybrids like the "extreme programming" model, which seems to be a more detailed rapid prototype model
_Requirements methodologies_:
* generally: Requirements are what. Specifications are how (although they mix).
Incorrect requirements = no product, or bogus development plan
The method from which we develop requirements is:
discovery
refinement
modeling
specifications
requirements elicitation(href="http://www.se i.cmu.edu/pub/documents/92.reports/pdf/tr12.92.pd
How to defend against requirements crep:
* use formal methods !
* use customer requirements formats such as manuals or other docs !
* your answer must not always be yes !
* proposed changes must be evaluated and rational !
* there is always nearly a version 2.0 !
* the customer almost always values quality over a short delay !
* remain flexible enough to react to the work-place !
"without a manual, we don't have a product".
also:
The Architect in particular
(missed a " in my last post)
"The Art of Computer Programming"
-- D. Knuth
Whatever happened to this approach?!
-- Maz
How are you so sure of that?
Do you have any evidence to present?
I think you are confused about the first OO language. It's name is Simula and was invented at the Norwegian computing centre in the 60's. The principal inventors were Kristen Nygård and Ole Johan Dahl. Modula is yet another Wirth-family language.
When you develop software by first designing it on paper with Functional Design and Technical Design reports, make database diagrams, N-Tier schema's where to put which functionality and code, UML schema's for your classes, you only have to type in what's already thought out. The only flaws you'll experience is bad algorithm coding (but that's not spagetti code) or detailbugs.
When you develop software using the evolutional model, that is: add code/functionality on the fly in an ongoing basis with short term designs and not based on original concepts and designs, you end up with eventually (most likely) a pile of code that has to be rewritten NOW because a new feature asks for it. because most of the time in these projects people do NOT choose to rewrite it, it's added anyway, resulting in spagetti.
In Short: evolutional model code is code where no theoretical basis is stated, there is no original manifest that illustrates WHY all the code is set up like this. MOST OSS projects are developped using the evolutional model. What helps is an ONGOING theoretical design document to function as a theoretical BASIS for the structure of the code. If there is NO designdocument or conceptdocument stating WHY code is structured the way it is structured, it's bad code. Period.
Another thing that adds up to bad coding is a bad naming scheme, or worse: no naming scheme at all! Nobody is forced to use hungarian coding, but please CHOOSE one! develop your own if no scheme suits you, but a scheme that HAS TO BE used by all developers in a project is a MUST to keep the code clean and updatable, even if you use designdocuments.
More and more OSS projects get tighter software teams with people who KNOW how to develop software, thus using designs and theory before starting to jam in the code, and that is a good thing. We ain't there yet however. For starters I'd suggest to take a look at the InfoZip sourcecode: ansi and non-ansi C together in 1 project... *UUHHHHH*
--
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Admittedly these are complex and arguably messy, but they have withstood the test of time and a million users.
Granted it has been over 5 years since I have lived in or even visited Knoxvegas, but you hit the nail on the head with that.
But honestly, it pales in comparison to the idiocy that is my current college campus.
This sig is false.
Actually, one of the biggest issues facing software development today is the way programmers are taught. In high school programming classes, the focus is on how to program in a particular language with immense detail given to syntax (Pascal, C, etc.). There is no idea of the underlying semantics of the language being passed on to the student.
In addition to this, many programmers are taught to be bitwise-byte-foolish. By using architecture-dependent and/or close-to-machine-level optimizations, they destroy any chance of lending extensibility to their programs.
Computer science education should focus on teaching good design skills so we turn out programmers and not code monkeys. One way to start is by teaching about lambda calculi, and progressively working up to functional programming, and finally to object-oriented programming. Once design principles (e.g., design patterns) are engrained in a programmer's mind, it's a trivial task to learn a new language to apply these principles to. We need to teach people how to recognize semantic differences between languages rather than syntactic so people don't choose a language for a project on how many braces they have to write. Unfortunately, too often are we following the "industry standard" rather than focusing on what's really important.
-Y
"There is no culture in computer science, only cults." - M. Felleisen
I'm currently working on a game which, when it's playable, I intend to release under the GPL (I know, 'release early, release often', but still, I don't like releasing a nonfinished product) -- I find the idea that literally the entire community of linux users could be looking at my source code is an enormous incentive to make it clean.
I guess the same force that motivates me to clean up the living room when people come over also motivates me to clean up my code when people are going to look at it. It's enough that they'll see how naieve a coder I am, I don't want them to think I'm a bad coder too.
Which reminds me, I have to go do the dishes....
-Denor
One of the good things about OO languages (and I'm not particularly fond of OO) is that they make you think about your data more. OO is not a silver bullet, though, since it's certainly possible to use one to organize your data badly. No language is a substitute for an experienced developer with some talent for organizing data in the right way for the particular project.
Of course, this is not a new concept. Fred Brooks said it nicely in The Mythical Man-Month, a book which should be required reading for everyone who does software development, and more so for people who manage development efforts.
Wow, sorry! That was a hell of a typo! Thanks for pointing it out, dude.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
I think that site and the one originally referenced are both running off the same 56k modem, god damn are they slow.
Welcome to the real world of software development!
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
... to ask anyone who managed to download the guides to repost them or make available for download on something that reads faster than 70 bytes per second?
The most interesting thing is the moderation totals:
Offtopic=2, Interesting=2, Funny=1, Total=5.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Offtopic? Yes.
Funny? Absolutly!
But interesting???
There are some similarities in what you describe to Extreme Programming. (search Yahoo if you want to find sites about XP)
rewrite it from scratch. i had a project that i inherited (company had spent 4 years and 3 million dollars on - gone thru 4 development teams) and i rewrote it. in 4 months. works great..we're getting ready to rerelease it. i rewrote it in java so its cross platform too.
I hear this story a lot, it's very interesting.
But it's also obvious that any commercial software developed in this way would be unfeasibly expensive, unfeatureful, and 5-10 years obsolete by the time it was done.
The NASA model most definately is NOT compatible with "internet time"
I've often had the same thoughts. One of the many reasons I use Linux is to escape the godawful GUIs from Apple and MS. Gnome is alright, I suppose, but it just strikes me as unpleasant. KDE is worse. (Warning: shameless plug follows...) GNUstep and Objective-C are what you want.
this happens to better programmers all the time....just pull a few 48 hour weekends and rewrite the thing, problem solved. Im half serious.....most insane code ive seen actually does very little and can be replaced with something of a fraction of the scale..but you have to throw *everything* away from the previous paradigm. Youll love the feeling but then youre going to own that project, so it better be good...
its fairly interesting that you didnt fight with him over your baby. most developers i know would have fought tooth and nail to throw the idiot off the project. anyway, if youre having troubl finding a job and you dont mind relocating, mail me. i'd be interested in getting someone with a good design philosophy if nothing else.
I'm really glad to see this. In my experience, the great flaw in the OSS model is the quality of the code. Can we be honest? The vast majority of it is complete crap, developed by amateurs with absolutely no clue how develop to professional standards.
The OSS community needs to establish some quality standards. Linux code is relatively new, but this is going to bite everyone in the butt as the code gets modified more and more, and software rot starts to rear its ugly head.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of OSS developers are not very old (less than 25), and don't have the perspective to appreciate trying to maintain 10 year old code that has been modified 20 zillion times.
Mark my words: Unless coding standards get real important soon, OSS is going to collapse under its own weight. "As long as it works" is not good enough.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Why do I get the feeling this problem isn't just found in OpenSource projects? Zillions of programms, both free and commercial, are badly designed from the start. Many more could be well designed if only they didn't have to worry about backward compatibility. (probably one of the biggest problems for Windows right now...) The Big Ball of Mud architecture isn't uncommon by any means. And it's not a problem that only OpenSource faces.
One example of some very well designed software is the Shuttle OS that powers NASA's Space Shuttle. In 420k lines of code each revision has only had 1 bug each that wasn't caught by testing. If we *really* want to make some good software it wouldn't be a bad idea to take these lessons to heart. OpenSource software is already good, lets make it better. Full artical here.
One of the emerging trends in academic "out there" approaches to software engineering has been moving patterns from architecture (sofware and housing) to behavioral practice, of which this is a negative example. For positive examples, there is an intesting website I ran across the other day about a concept called "Extreme Programming". This concept wouldn't scale to the sort of distributed development done for OSS, but portions of it might. In any case, documenting robust positive patterns for OSS development sounds like an interesting project.
I thought the comparisons to Design Patterns were hilarious but way too true.
Bleh!
its fairly easy to measure objects with a camera given all the variables such as distance to object, camera focus etc. lots of universities are doing stuff on this - you might want to look at the webpages of the machine vision groups at most universities. object recognition and measurement is a well researched problem - just use existing algorithms, dont try to do a Ph.D. :)
i believe cognex actually sells systems such as those..they also have fairly good info on the subject.
There is a big difference between working alone and being a team player.
When I write code that only I will ever read (which is normal for me), I don't have to worry so much about making it readable (i.e. comments, appropriate labels, overall good design). When I read it, my brain will fill in a lot of the gaps that I've left. Even if I've "forgotten" the details, a lot of information can come back from my subconcious.
When I write code others will have to read (which I've done a few times, badly) everything needs to be much more clear. My co-workers / buddies don't have access to my subconcious. All they know is what I write.
If I try to be a team player without adapting my techniques (cough cough), a Big Ball of Mud can develope.
And with OSS, there may not be a more experienced developer around to badger me into doing it right.
---
Dammit, my mom is not a Karma whore!
The article can also be found here (page down), and there's quite a bit of related information there as well.
-dwd-
Anti Patterns: Refactoring Software, Archetectures and Projects in Crisis
ISBN 0-471-19713-0
Excellent book, I would highly recommend getting your bosses a copy or get a copy if you are running a project, its concise, incisive and useful, personally I'd rate it up there with The Mythical Man Month and helps when you need to point out the company is making a classic mistake.
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
Yeah, but it was Osterhout who came up with the idea of a scripting language in the first place. Granted, as an implementation of this idea, I'd argue that Perl was far more successful, as well as more useful in general, than Tcl... but still, it was Osterhout who thought of it first.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
Large Scale C++ Software Design, by John Lakos. This book has done more to improve my coding and software design skills than any other book I have read. If you program in C++, you MUST read this book. Until you have, you don't know the language. The concepts described in the book apply to other languages as well (as long as you are using OOP).
------
And from the alpha-geeks perspective its the other way around, there are few companies that you really want to work for, most bosses have no clue as to how good you really are, I have walked out of places that wanted to give me IQ tests, after all I only have 8 years professional development under my belt!( I really mess them up when I give them the old Einstien quote about what can be counted and what counts :) Right now, I am happily having fun with coding things I like, for the shear pleasure of proving some ideas ( I have money so I don't actually need a job ), no one understands at all, my parents and freinds have flipped, they think I _must_ have a job to be a functioning member of society, oh the irony here, and heres a thought, why doesn't someone build a geek meter for companies, so we all know which ones we should gravitate towards? Perhaps the boys at /. would be good enough to have it as part of their site ( BTW I'm not going to send you a bill, I'd just like to see the idea happen and I'm sooo deep in other things I don't have the time :)
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
Hmm...I suddenly feel a song coming on...
(With apologies to Jerry Lee Lewis)
Great Balls of Mud
You shake my nerves and you rattle my brain
Too much hacking drives a man insane
You broke my will, oh what a thrill
Goodness gracious great balls of mud!
I laughed at coding 'cause I thought it was funny
You came along and moved me honey
I've changed my mind, your love is fine
Goodness gracious great balls of mud!
Not long ago, there was a slashdot post about the Linux Kernel 2.4 to-do list.
Someone complained that the list was proof that linux kernel development, and open source development overall, is bad.
The argument was that any decent system would keep everything working all the time. My reply was that innovation doesn't come easily, and that you can't improve a system, while keeping all of its parts working the entire time.
It's no wonder that closed software gets so bad and bloated; they're all probably doing the very things listed in this ball of mud article. "Daily builds" can sound like such a good idea, but they do lead to problems.
Why does spaghetti end up all tangled up? Or, a more practical problem, why do power cords, cables, phone lines, etc. all end up in a gigantic ball underneath my desk, no matter how many times I sort them out? I don't think it is just Murphy's Law.
My own theory on this is that the cable, cord, etc. tends to be more weighted down in the center, and therefore drags there. As it drags, it forces other cables, cords, etc. out of the way. As soon as it forces them out of the way and drops down to a lower level, the tension on the other cords, cables, etc. tends to make them wrap around the heavier cables cords...so in about a month or so, they all tend to tie around each other.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
Ball of mud? Bad ideas? Low quality?
No fair. I've been working on patenting these techniques.
---
Dammit, my mom is not a Karma whore!
I haven't read the content that the link points to. I'm more interested in getting my comment posted before 50 comments are totalled. Why? It'd obvious. Mendel's algorithm tells us that log(n)^4 comments >= 50 is the breaking point for wide viewership. After the 50 comment mark, only 3% of positive moderation occurs. I want to make sure that this comment does not suffer that fate.
Moderators, I ask that you please reward me for putting together such an informative post. Is it off-topic? Perhaps. Is it what the people want to see? Perhaps. Is is what the people will see because it has been entered before the 50 mark? Yes.
Thank you.
When I write, I go along a line of argumentation until something starts feeling wrong, like I've strayed too far. That's when I go back, read all that I have written, fix it up, and then continue writing until I have to stop again.
When I code, I do exactly the same thing: code until it feels too messy, go back, rework, continue to code anew, get stuck, etc.
The result has been fairly decent code that isn't too bad to alter over time. However, sometimes I get tempted to overhaul code when it really isn't necessary, because some minor issues are bothering me. (This happened with GeekPress when I was just a few days of programming away from launch, but thankfully my husband helped me get over my fussiness!)
Since I've always completely coded my own projects (even when working within a company), I have no idea whether others code in a similar fashion or not. (I'm sure that my situation is greatly simplified by the fact that I don't have co-programmers. That seems like a nightmare to me!)
-- Diana Hsieh
-- Diana Hsieh
GeekPress: The Weirder Side of Tech News
There is a great book about anti patterns. :-) they show
This are patterns to avoid
bad architecture, mircro architecture or
process habit.
There is a book about them from Brown et all.
published by Wiley.
You should have a copy as of the GoF book.
Regards,
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Some of the more respectable C++ journals have recently done some good article and interviews about Extreme Programming. I highly recommend looking into it; even if you adopt none of its practices, the concepts raise good points.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
>It is hard to find really good Software Architects.
I figure that SW Architects are a bit like the other kind of Architect (those who design buildings), so it might be worth mentioning one kind of architect: those who Want To Be Artists, but decided they like a steady paycheck, don't want to starve to death in a garret, so they get a degree in architecture.
These architects are the most disorganized pains in the ass, always working to the last moment when they decide ``'we have to stop & leave the mistakes in", thus throwing off the timetable for deliverables & making the rest of the group pissed off. And they usually don't deliver very good work, either.
I figure there are numeorus members of this school of architecture working in Redmond right now.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
The problem with what you said is that sometimes a power relationship exists that won't let you do that.
If you're a lowly junior developer, and your boss's boss's boss walks in and suggests that you re-code your perl text-processing program into java and xml, because the other department is doing that, you can't ask him to write that up in a detailed way.
This is taken from http://www.freebsd.org/handbook/current-stable.htm l
18.2.1.1. What is FreeBSD-CURRENT?
FreeBSD-CURRENT is, quite literally, nothing more than a daily snapshot of the working sources for FreeBSD. These include work in progress, experimental changes and transitional mechanisms that may or may not be present in the next official release of the software. While many of us compile almost daily from FreeBSD-CURRENT sources, there are periods of time when the sources are literally un-compilable. These problems are generally resolved as expeditiously as possible, but whether or not FreeBSD-CURRENT sources bring disaster or greatly desired functionality can literally be a matter of which part of any given 24 hour period you grabbed them in!
WWJD? JWRTFM!!!
heh. let me know how it works out.
You can set your threshold to read -2 postings. Use the controls at the top of the comments listing to set your threshold to -1 and check the Save box, then click "Change". Then manually edit the Threshold field in the URL that gets returned so that it says "threshold=-2", then hit Enter. Voila!
--
--
Do I look like I speak for my employer?
Damn, I am fighting back tears, that was the most intelligent paragraph I have seen here. Yea take a look at GTK what a crap ass kludge. Sure you can write a GUI with it but you cannot write a good one with it. Qt is a little better at least it has a solid design. That preprocessor signal slot crap is total bullshit and leads or will lead to totally non portable code. Now lets talk about make files, what a bunch of shit that is also. This is the year 2000 people make files have long outlived their usefullness. How about something just a little better.
Got Code?
When I say lambda calculi, I mean variations on the lambda calculus, e.g., the lambda calculus + assignment, the lambda calculus + mutually recursive closures. While perhaps it is too abstract for beginners, it is something that should be taught at some level.
:= NUMBER | SLIST
:= zero | (suc NUM)
I did use the word trivial. A lot of good programming style boils down to having a clear definition of the data on which you are operating. Aspiring programmers should be taught how to construct inductively defined data, how to model programs to handle inductively defined data, and how to provide the implementation for the program model.
Let's say you have a definition of data:
SEXP
SLIST:= empty | (cons SEXP SLIST)
This provides the definition for a data set that encompasses numbers, lists of numbers, lists of lists of numbers, etc.
To write a generic program template, you look at the data definition and provide a clause for all possible forms of the data. A program to process SEXP's would have a helper program to process numbers, and a helper program to process SLIST's, which would have cases for empty and cons. If you wanted to be strict, you could define NUMBER as
NUMBER
i.e., 1 = (suc zero), 2 = (suc (suc zero))
Once you have the program templates defined, you can "port" it to whatever language best suits your needs. If you are using a functional or imperative programming language, your cases will be inside conditional blocks. If you are using an object-oriented language, your cases should be handled by dynamic dispatch.
The other issue in good programming comes when not enough people follow a model of incremental development. Software should be built on stable kernels of code that are tested at each step of the way. Deliberate thought should be put into designing code interfaces so that when the time comes to make modifications to a codebase, the modifications fit snugly in parameters already defined by the codebase, rather than hacks thrown on like press-on nails. You don't have to worry about legacy as much if your original code was written to stand the test of time.
Have you looked at the Slash code, for example? Most of the code is in one monolithic function affectionately nicknamed the "Beast." There is hardly any sense of modularity or interface design between modules because there are hardly any modules at all. It makes it very difficult to improve without a massive rewrite as any improvements will have to be add-on hacks. If the current state of programming education does not improve and start teaching fundamentals instead of dropping students in a C++ (or Pascal, or whatever) environment and saying, "Learn!", then code will continue to turn into unmaintainable spaghetti.
"There is no culture in computer science, only cults." - M. Felleisen
Just the other day I was in talking with the lead developer for one of the projects I was on over the last 9 months, explaining to him how the last 7 years of code that had been written on the project was completely underdesigned and thrown together with duct tape and bailing wire. I cannot even begin to describe it. And I am supposed to be the buildmaster for this, and we are looking to have offsite developers go to town on this stuff. He looked at me, and listened to me bitch and then said "Well, we don't want to invest a lot of time into this, or money." WHat??!?!?!? He wants me to restructure the last seven years of work in a slap dash manner, not even fixing the problem, or making it worse! It was exactly this kind of thinking that got me to the point where I had to say this has got to stop. I may be just ranting, but what the hell else am I going to do? I am supposed to be buildmaster and tech support. Well, because it is such a bear to install, we have like 3 users. Guess what? I don't have anything to do but fix it! SO what am I going to do? I am going to come in on weekends and work when he is not looking and make it go, and do it right, because I am _offended_ by the crappiness of the hierarchy and code design. Now, I am not a total lone wolf here, I am discussing the structure with them, but people need to realize that a crappy design leads to a crappy project.
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
It is hard to find really good Software Architects. Lately the tendency has being to produce code at the speed of rabbit procreation - 10 times a week. The problem has gotten worse over time due to the popular rapid development tools such as Visual Basic for Windows and Object Oriented approaches such as Java for JVM. The bad news is that this deters new good programmers to appear instead of old ones. The old programming school did not have to face such issues as handling millions of users and huge databases or creating user interfaces accessible to a novice user, they were mostly concerned with the speed. Ability to hack together some brilliant Assembly code was the primary concern, I admit it is cool.
Today most so-called Microsoft Certified 'Engineers' have no clue what 'Assembly' stands for but they still don't know how to handle millions of users terrabytes of data or create decent user interfaces. The problem is that computer science became popular among those people who have no real call in their lives and who regard their work as simply a way of getting their salary. Large salaries of IT department does not help too much, they create an unhealthy attitude towards the profession.
Working on a large project that is supposed to be scalable to millions of customers, supposed to handle multiple user interfaces of various wireless devices (PDAs, Cell Phones etc) over time I had to design various components of the system. In the beginning there was only an idea which later became basically a large collection of various components. I have never before had to design and build such a complex piece of software and I am just happy that my current formal education allows me to make sound judgements about network traffic averages and variances, the speed of code in terms of iterations (big-O, big-Omega, big-Theta, they are usefull after all), being able to handle various datastructures and even creating my own new tree designs.
Nevertheless, all the way through I've felt the need for an experienced software architect. My company did not have one and we still don't and I think it is very difficult to find one with really good experience and skills.
Once I have seing a real software architect at work (he was in his forties) he was giving a presentation of his design and it was jus WOW. I mean even after working professionally for three years and handling hundreds of different programming and design problems, I don't think I could produced such a thoughtfull design that goes into details and goes over every possible issue with all the computations and considerations. It was beautiful.
I wish we all could learn from the best.
You can't handle the truth.