Taco Bell Programming

theodp writes "Think outside the box? Nah, think outside the bun. Ted Dziuba argues there's a programming lesson to be learned from observing how Taco Bell manages to pull down $1.9 billion by mixing-and-matching roughly eight ingredients: 'The more I write code and design systems, the more I understand that many times, you can achieve the desired functionality simply with clever reconfigurations of the basic Unix tool set. After all, functionality is an asset, but code is a liability. This is the opposite of a trend of nonsense called DevOps, where system administrators start writing unit tests and other things to help the developers warm up to them — Taco Bell Programming is about developers knowing enough about Ops (and Unix in general) so that they don't overthink things, and arrive at simple, scalable solutions.'"

Comments

which language is best?

[phantomfive]

Reminds me of a job interview I did once with an old guy, he had around 30 different programming languages on his resume. I asked him which programming language was his favorite, expecting it to be something like Lisp or Forth, but he said, "shell script." I was a bit surprised, but he said, "it lets me tie pieces in from everywhere and do it all with the least amount of code."

I wasn't entirely convinced, but he did have the resume. Seems Mr Dziuba is from the same school of thought. I read the full introduction to the DevOps page and I'm still not entirely sure what it's about. We should work together and deliver on time, or something like that.

Re:which language is best?

[itlurksbeneath]

Bingo. CS has nothing to do with programming languages. It's about PROGRAMMING. Lots of CS grads still don't get this. They are typically the mediocre programmers that move on to project management (or something else that doesn't involve programming) fairly quickly. Or they end up doing horrible ASP web apps and Microsoft Access front ends.

Re:which language is best?

[ShakaUVM]

>>A skilled C programmer also needs less than 1 hour for something like that.

Hmm, well if you want to time yourself, here's a common enough task that I automate with shell scripts. I just timed myself. Including logging in, doing a detour into man and a 'locate access_log' to find the file, it took a bit less than 4 minutes.

tail -n 100 /var/log/apache2/access_log | cut -f1 -d" " | sort | uniq

Grabs the end of the access_log and shows you the last few ip addresses that have connected to your site. I do something like this occasionally. Optionally pipe it into xargs host to do DNS lookups on them, if that's how you prefer to roll.

I'm honestly curious how long it will take you to do it in C, with/without the DNS lookup. Post source if you don't mind.

Re:8 keywords?

[Anonymous Coward]

exactly.

Those 8 keywords are + - > [ ] . ,

Simplicity

[SimonInOz]

The complexity people seem to delight in putting into things always amazes me. I was recently working at a major bank (they didn't like me eventually as I'm bad at authority structures). Anyway the area I was working on involved opening bank accounts from the web site. Complicated, right? The new account holder has to choose the type of account they want (of about 7), enter their details (name, address, etc), and press go. Data gets passed about, the mainframe makes the account, and we return the new account number.

Gosh.

So why, oh tell me why, did they use the following list of technologies (usually all on the same jsp page) [I may have missed some]
HTML
CSS
JSP (with pure java on the page)
Javascript (modifying the page)
JQuery
XML
XSLT
JDBC with Hibernate
JDBC without Hibernate
Custom Tag library
Spring (including AOP)
J2EE EJBs
JMS

Awesome. All this on each of the countless pages, each custom designed and built. Staggering. In fact, the site needed about 30 pages, many of them minor variations of each other. The whole thing could have been built using simple metadtata. It would have run faster, been easier to debug and test (the existing system was a nightmare), and easily changeable to suit the new business requirements that poured in.

So instead of using one efficient, smart programmer for a while, then limited support after that, they had a team of (cheap) very nervous programmers, furiously coding away, terrified lest they break something. And yes, there were layers and layers of software, each overriding the other as the new programmer didn't understand the original system, so added their own. Palimpsest, anyone?

And yet, despite my offers to rebuild the whole thing this way (including demos), management loved it. Staggering.

But I still like to keep things simple. And yes, my name is Simon. And yes, I do want a new job.

Re:Simplicity

[MichaelSmith]

Complexity creates bugs

Bugs create employment