Interesting thread of programmers dealing with the inherent complexity of the average codebase.
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Alfredo
Jun 26, 2015, 7:25:31 PM6/26/15
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9784008
What do you think about this? It seems to me that if the dataflow of a program was made explicit rather than implicit, these woes would not exist, or become greatly diminished.
Paul Morrison
Jun 28, 2015, 7:57:32 PM6/28/15
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E.g. the first paragraph and a bit of the Introduction to my book ("Flow-Based Programming") (both editions):
"Imagine that you have a large and complex application running in your shop, and you discover that you need what looks like fairly complex changes made to it in a hurry. You consult your programmers and they tell you that the changes will probably take several months, but they will take a look. A meeting is called of all the people involved – not just programmers and analysts, but users and operations personnel as well. The essential logic of the program is put up on the wall, and the program designers walk through the program structure with the group. During the ensuing discussion, they realize that two new modules have to be written and some other ones have to change places. Total time to make the changes – a week!
"Quite a few parts of this scenario sound unlikely, don’t they? Users, operations people and programmers all talking the same language – unthinkable! But it actually did happen just the way I described."
This would have been in the mid-to-late '70s - maybe not impressive by today's standards, but pretty impressive then!
"Imagine that you have a large and complex application running in your shop, and you discover that you need what looks like fairly complex changes made to it in a hurry. You consult your programmers and they tell you that the changes will probably take several months, but they will take a look. A meeting is called of all the people involved – not just programmers and analysts, but users and operations personnel as well. The essential logic of the program is put up on the wall, and the program designers walk through the program structure with the group. During the ensuing discussion, they realize that two new modules have to be written and some other ones have to change places. Total time to make the changes – a week!
"Quite a few parts of this scenario sound unlikely, don’t they? Users, operations people and programmers all talking the same language – unthinkable! But it actually did happen just the way I described."
This would have been in the mid-to-late '70s - maybe not impressive by today's standards, but pretty impressive then!
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