[FRIAM] IT is Not Sustainable

[thompnickson2 at gmail.com]

What role does occam's razor play in software development? Any?  Or did it
used to, and now it doesn't any more. 

By the way, I apologize if I am not staying with this discussion adequately.
The last few days have been a firehose of good stuff and, to be honest, I am
choking on it.  

N

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
 


-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Russell Standish
Sent: Thursday, December 26, 2019 9:39 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] IT is Not Sustainable

On Thu, Dec 26, 2019 at 07:29:27AM +0000, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Most programmers won't struggle to rationalize or improve code written by
other people.    The problem is that people are selfish.  They think that
their 10K LOC problem is beautiful and nimble, but that 1M LOC was once that
too.    It's the behavior of teenagers.

Well the examples I mentioned were all rewritten/refactored from a selfish
need - I had inherited code that I had experienced as having high technical
debt, requiring much more effort to modify for future needs than ought to
be, and eventually persuaded my PM that fixing that debt was a good
investment.

Of course a piece of crap code that happens to work just fine, and doesn't
need to be touched, I will leave that well alone, of if necessary, craft an
interface that takes care of administrative needs (such as memory allocation
and so on). I only refactor code that gets in the way of getting the job
done.

My point really was that the difficulty of working on a codebase is directly
correlated with LOC, and that acceptable brevity a desirable trait (my taste
for brevity seems to be much more developed than many of my colleagues,
however, perhaps because I have a mathematical background!).


-- 

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Dr Russell Standish                    Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Senior Research Fellow        hpcoder at hpcoders.com.au
Economics, Kingston University         http://www.hpcoders.com.au
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