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Six Laws of the New Software
LordFoom writes "Still suffering from post-dotcom stress disorder, I keep my eye out for gentle balm to sooth my ravaged psyche. The manifestos at ChangeThis are not it. The most popular manifestos range from irritating to enlightening, with none of them particularly comforting. In particular the recent Six Laws of the New Software have done my dreams of writing lucrative code no good - although it has changed my idea of what money-making code is."
There was a widespread belief among physicists that there's nothing more to discover in physics. They were wrong. This guy is also wrong.
When developing a web browser, if a plug-in needs to be launched, don't let the plug-in's loading cause all other instances of the browser to lock up.
I'm looking at you, Firefox.
What's the deal with the PDF-format anyway? The document is 17 pages of Powerpoint-like slides. I'm sure some nice, simple HTML could have displayed that much more quickly. And not locked up Firefox for a minute.
But seriously, I thought the dot com bust was actually a *good* thing for real programmers. It weeded out all those retards with a geology degree who were in it just for the cash. Granted, those who were actually good at coding made a lot more back in those days. But if you're actually talented then there is no reason you can't make what you want to make. Doesn't matter what the profession is.
.pdf download? First off it's /.ed, second... isn't that what the webpage is there for in the first place?
Anyways, what's the deal with the
By and large there is no need to demand your users trust you with full write access to their home directory, their ethernet device, and more. Consider writing your software in the Java Web Start sandbox.
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All the good stuff has already been thought of, but not everyone knows they exist. Try to find really good ideas by looking back at least 10 years for a piece of software that never took off and has been abandoned and remarket it as the next big thing. Remember: Marketing people could sell blood to a turnip.
It seems like some of these people spend more time writing about software than actually writing software...
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One good rule when writing software would be to assume people are profoundly retarded, thus maximising the possible market share of your software by making it really easy to use.
do the machinists create manifestos about their work? get over it, programming is mildly creative, but whole notion of paradigm-changing products is grossly overinflated. try doing something that has some obvious utility and dont try to ream people for it.
You're on to something here. The essential design principle is composability. Take Lego for example. You can make complex artifacts by assembling many existing elements together.
A similar, but distinct, principle is extensibility. To continue with the Lego example, it allows you to invent a completely new element that extends the behavior of existing elements, a slider piece for example.
Not to get totally pedantic, but let's have one more. The principle of modularity enables both of the above. Originally, it meant that you could replace any piece with a functionally identical substitute. But what makes it such an interesting principle is that there are different aspects of identity. Two 1x8 Legos might be replaced by a 2x4 and two 2x2s, and so on, and perhaps the substitution has different and desirable properties.
The source of all modularity is the enabling principle of standardization. And here, if you care, is where open source comes into the picture. Because it's very hard for multiple parties to ever agree on a common standard if the candidate designs are all secret!
So your intuition is right. There is something about Unix that gives it a fundamental advantage over proprietary alternatives. However, to debate between command line and GUI, or likewise to compare statistics on security incidents, is to focus on emergent symptoms. I get frustrated with these debates because they never really seem to converge on a clear answer.
A clear answer does emerge when we look to deeper principles. These aren't just a matter of subjective preference, they are fundamental to the design of any complex artifact. Designs which express these principles are objectively superior to designs which don't. And I think that's worth remembering.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
He says, correctly, that HTML is the standard for documents on the Web.
He says stick to these standards.
His own article is in a crappy PDF - possibly the lamest format possible for web articles.
A case of "do as I say not as I do"
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