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Mariano Guerra 2024-04-10 08:15:55

📜 Past Futures of Coding February 2020 Edition

Stefan Lesser 2024-04-10 12:52:24

I’ve been reviewing classic papers about simplicity, complexity, and adjacent topics, both for my current series of essays and an essay I’m writing for Onward!

So far I have reviewed (or downloaded for review):

  • Herbert A. Simon, The Architecture of Complexity (1962)
  • Melvin E. Conway, How Do Committees Invent? (1968)
  • Peter Naur, Programming as Theory Building (1985)
  • Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., No Silver Bullet — Essence and Accident in Software Engineering (1986)
  • Richard P. Gabriel, Worse is Better (1991)
  • Rich Hickey, Simple Made Easy (2011)

What am I missing? What else should be on that list?

Paul Tarvydas 2024-04-10 13:30:39

Norman's "The Design of Everyday Things" ... IMO, "simplicity" is a relative term - it's in the eyes of the beholder. All of the above-mentioned papers are relevant to developers, not users. Researchers appear to think that Lambda Calculus is beautifully simple and expressive, whereas webpage designers would not agree - L.C. contains too much nuance (complexity) for their purposes.

Christopher Shank 2024-04-10 17:51:40

Pace Layers by Stewart Brand is probably related github.com/Little-Languages/reading-club/tree/main/topics/pace%20layers

Stefan Lesser 2024-04-11 10:43:17

“simplicity" is a relative term - it’s in the eyes of the beholder

Yeah, that’s not a widely spread belief in software circles, yet. My essay is going to address that. And surely the papers I listed all explicitly or implicitly assume that simplicity can be objectively defined. Curiously, most of them just assume but don’t attempt to define it. Hickey gets bonus points, because he actually does.

Paul Tarvydas 2024-04-11 12:30:52

FYI - my favourite definition of simplicity is "the lack of nuance" (it came from an online dictionary, but, I can't seem find it again to properly reference it)

Chris Knott 2024-04-11 19:18:01

Out of the Tar Pit?

Ionuț G. Stan 2024-04-11 19:21:04

Big Ball of Mud? laputan.org/mud/mud.html

📝 Big Ball of Mud

While much attention has been focused on high-level software architectural patterns, what is, in effect, the de-facto standard software architecture is seldom discussed. This paper examines the most frequently deployed architecture: the BIG BALL OF MUD

Alex McLean 2024-04-12 11:50:06

At this point I think it's good to think about the demographic of the writers you're reading, and look outside the cul de sac you might be in..

Alex McLean 2024-04-12 12:08:53

These are probably curveballs but are interesting mostly in terms of making complex things from simple parts:

  • Petre, Marian, Helen Sharp, and Jeffrey Johnson. ‘Complexity through Combination: An Account of Knitwear Design’. Design Studies 27, no. 2 (March 2006): 183–222. doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2005.07.003.
  • Osamu Sato. The Art Of Computer Designing: A Black and White Approach : Osamu Sato : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming , 1993. archive.org/details/satoArtOfComputerDesigning.
  • Polanyi, Michael, and Amartya Sen. The Tacit Dimension . University of Chicago Press, 2009.
  • Stewart, Ian. Fearful Symmetry: Is God a Geometer? Mineola, N.Y: Dover Publications Inc., 2010.
  • Spiegel, Laurie. ‘Manipulations of Musical Patterns’. In Proceedings of the Symposium on Small Computers and the Arts , 19–22, 1981.
Dave Liepmann 2024-04-12 12:47:46

Hofstadter gets into the intuitive nature of simplicity (which he puts adjacent to beauty) in a few GEB passages

Stephen De Gabrielle 2024-04-12 14:52:02

I forget. The APL guy. Turing award. He said some good stuff.

Stephen De Gabrielle 2024-04-12 14:53:13

And the Forth book.

Stefan Lesser 2024-04-12 16:18:33

@Stephen De Gabrielle The APL guy must be Kenneth E. Iverson, his most popular paper probably Notation as a Tool of Thought . Did you mean that one?