Ayende @ Rahien

Former Math Guy commented on Simple != Poor Quality, period!

Tue, 16 Oct 2007 22:08:10 GMT

In mathematics, there is a phenomenon where, as an area is better understood, the best proofs of a given theorem get shorter and easier to understand. The same is true for code. As you understand the requirements and algorithms better, the code gets simpler.

creaothceann commented on Simple != Poor Quality, period!

Mon, 15 Oct 2007 19:32:33 GMT

Shannon: A typo....?

Shannon commented on Simple != Poor Quality, period!

Mon, 15 Oct 2007 09:18:33 GMT

Also, what the hell is Esitmated?

Niki commented on Simple != Poor Quality, period!

Sun, 14 Oct 2007 17:09:13 GMT

Bart: I think your problem is that you don't really know what the term "beautiful code" means (yet). It does _not_ mean beautiful as in "a beautiful rokoko painting, with lots of useless but pretty details". At least as I understand the term, it means something like in "a beautiful mathematical proof", which has two main qualities: 1. It's short and 2. its obviously correct. (In that sense, Carmac's 1/sqrt-implmentation is exceedingly ugly, and the only reason to build something like that is that you timed, with a profiler, that 1/sqrt is a bottleneck in your absolutely performance-critical appllication.) But, to be honest, it took me some time to figure that out myself, too ;-)

João Marcus commented on Simple != Poor Quality, period!

Sun, 14 Oct 2007 13:57:56 GMT

I'm currently maintaining a Delphi system that was built as Bart said. "Why care about maintainability? Let's just make this work!". Bottom line: now, all the logic is spread across different buttons, menu entries, etc. So, when you're going to change the validation of a given field, you have to check: all of the textbox's events, the "save" button for the given record, the "save" button for a global record, the "print" button (the data needs to be validated before it's printed), the "upload data" button, etc.

Ayende Rahien commented on Simple != Poor Quality, period!

Sun, 14 Oct 2007 08:10:23 GMT

David, I have found those people too, in much greater quantities than the good guys, but that doesn't mean that I need to stoop to their level, it means that I need to find a way to make them work in mine. I do, and I have.

Ayende Rahien commented on Simple != Poor Quality, period!

Sun, 14 Oct 2007 08:08:53 GMT

Casey, If you have followed my suggestions, you could have seen that I am proposing much of the same thing, although I am careful to phrase it differently, and drag & drop is not involved :-)

David commented on Simple != Poor Quality, period!

Sun, 14 Oct 2007 07:49:02 GMT

Sadly I feel that Casey is right and Ayende bravely, wonderfully, inspiringly, totally wrong. I love programming and can program quite well in C, Haskell, Lisp, Java, C#, ML, Smalltalk, Python. I work in C# these days. I work as a contractor in the North East of England and have done for over 10 years working in every sector. I’d love to set up a little software shop and do it right but as it is I have to go work in large and small companies with enterpisey developers. I have worked with scores, possibly hundreds of such developers. Perhaps 1 in 10 actually gave a rats ass and would have understood what being able to pass a function around our use generics/templates, who really, really /got/ inheritance and interfaces or so forth. [anecdotes removed] Frankly, the reality of IT is that it is chock full of utterly clueless code monkeys who never read a book couldn’t give a fig about their job but then almost nobody give a toss about doing a good job in any job, its strictly about getting paid and getting the beers in. I love programming and get paid very well for it, but my god my colleagues are a downer.

Casey commented on Simple != Poor Quality, period!

Sun, 14 Oct 2007 07:21:44 GMT

>>I think the issue of getting a 100 average devs to do IOC/MVC style work is partially addressed by the Microsoft P&P Guidance Automation toolkits and their related software factories. Using this kind of framework, you can decent architectures with a wizard type of environment. << Well, every consultancy already had their own versions of this ... it is back to the drag and drop idea ... get enough monkeys together, give them a mouse and they will probably hack something to gether that looks right. The real developes can fix it later :) The idea of a "standard framework" that lesser skilled developers can easily use has been tried at every single organisation I have ever worked at - it is the silver bullet that management always wants... "our good developers will set this up, then we save money by hiring cheaper people to just link it all together" ... it has never worked yet :) I suspect the P&P factories have never been used in a real project that didn;t have MS as one of the consultacies involved in delivering the solution, nor will it ever be used in anger.

Ayende Rahien commented on Simple != Poor Quality, period!

Sun, 14 Oct 2007 06:36:10 GMT

She, What language? What other options?

she commented on Simple != Poor Quality, period!

Sun, 14 Oct 2007 06:14:44 GMT

This language is so ugly... why use such a complicated language if other languages get the same with less code? Too many sacrifice speed over their life-time

Darrel Miller commented on Simple != Poor Quality, period!

Sun, 14 Oct 2007 02:47:25 GMT

@Casey - I think the issue of getting a 100 average devs to do IOC/MVC style work is partially addressed by the Microsoft P&P Guidance Automation toolkits and their related software factories. Using this kind of framework, you can decent architectures with a wizard type of environment. @Bart : I would put money that if you are still developing software in 10 years you will not think the same way.

Ayende Rahien commented on Simple != Poor Quality, period!

Sat, 13 Oct 2007 20:55:03 GMT

Bart, The answer you gave is wrong. To be more exact, it is phrased in the wrong terms. "Because I can get things faster this way, and _keep_ going fast in a month and in a year" > if I can get to market with an idea/release/upgrade 40% faster because u took code shortcuts. Sure, you can do that, but then you have 4000% higher costs in the _next_ feature / bug fix.

Bart Czernicki commented on Simple != Poor Quality, period!

Sat, 13 Oct 2007 19:29:18 GMT

Why does everyone argue STUPID crap all the time. One of the things I have learned about 3 years ago is when the CIO asked me: "What do I gain for doing it this way?" My answer consisting of "more maintanable/readable code" didn't go well. Bottom line is...if I can get to market with an idea/release/upgrade 40% faster because u took code shortcuts. That is MAGNITUDES times better than being late and having essentially "pretty" code. Developers don't cut each other slack. Most don't have a clue that none of this stuff really matters. Ur not saving the manatees no matter HOW great ur code/design/architecture is. Once in a while there will be a piece of code that is admired (i.e. square root opimization in Quake). http://www.codemaestro.com/reviews/review00000105.html

Ayende Rahien commented on Simple != Poor Quality, period!

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 21:30:01 GMT

Rob, Absolutely! But good practices should hopefully produce good results (otherwise why practice them?), so you can prove efficiency with results. That does tend to make things easier

Rob Meyer commented on Simple != Poor Quality, period!

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 21:04:50 GMT

That makes sense, it's just really, really hard. :-) And the important part of the argument is that on the flip side, the vendors are selling their silver-bullet products -hard-, at all levels. Especially at Microsoft, their sales machine is brilliant and relentless. (I wonder how many CEO or CTO's passed through the executive briefing center today....). So our voices, way down from the depths of the organization that in order to be more productive we need to be more selective about who we hire is pretty much the opposite of what they are being sold. They are being sold on the idea that all these fancy platforms and tools cut back on your need to have as many talented people on the ground. So the organization pressure is to hire more people, faster and cheaper. That culture is very difficult to carve out a niche to build a smaller, better, more efficient development team that writes high quality code. When you developer salaries are capped, change is a long hard road, and your open job reqs. start counting against if you if they are open to long and get closed, it takes a lot of ground and middle management skill to shield a high quality development team.

Udi Dahan commented on Simple != Poor Quality, period!

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 20:13:57 GMT

I think that we need to add some context to the discussion. Let's say we need to get out a quick app to 5 users who will use it once a week for non-critical work. As a manager, I would probably be OK with any kind of code that got the job done. On the other hand, if I'm managing a project that deals with target acquisition for missiles, I'd be much more concerned with the code quality, specifically issues of testability. The kind of developers that I'd look for in each case would be different. The criteria for what constitutes acceptable code would be different. The amount of money I'd be willing to pay for developers with those skills would be different. All points made so far can be correct, given the appropriate context.

Ayende Rahien commented on Simple != Poor Quality, period!

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 19:28:25 GMT

There is a distinct difference between liking my work and having professional pride in what I do. This is not about meeting people who like what they do, they may not care "it is just a job" or dislike it "sucky job", but nevertheless, you ought to take pride in what you are doing. Before I was a developer I was working in a position that I loathed. That didn't prevent me from doing it moderately well, and attempt to be successful. The Minimum Required approach is one that end up hurting the employee in the end, and will cause any employer to want to get rid of that person.

Ayende Rahien commented on Simple != Poor Quality, period!

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 19:13:37 GMT

Rob, We got around to discussing the applicability of this concerns with beginners, but they would never get the chance to build it from scratch. They would only get the chance to get it working from the given architecture. I am not suggesting throwing them an IoC article and an MVC webcast and coming back in six months to see what they did. I am talking about having an architecture in place that split what they need to do into small pieces, carefully defined so they don't have much place to add complexity. You catch the additional complexity in code reviews, and you sit with that dev and go through refactoring it until it is simple. Over time, they get a sense of it and write simple code by default.

Casey commented on Simple != Poor Quality, period!

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 19:10:40 GMT

>>I disagree, because I think that a sense of professional pride is mandatory for a healthy life. I am privileged to work in a field that I love, but a lot of people don't get this chance, and work in something that they have very little personal interest in. _But_, they still take pride in doing the job right, on time, and efficiently. << In that case not only are you lucky enough to work with some very experienced and dedicated induviduals, but you are lucky enough to encounter these people in every line of work in your everyday life. I tend to find the great majority of people don't like their jobs. I can probably count on one hand the number pof developers that I have worked with (which must be in the hundreds) who even read a blog outside of work, or have ever attended a conference. Those who work at what they love are lucky, but they are also pretty rare. And from another comment - I think Paula Bean sums it up pretty well ... http://worsethanfailure.com/Articles/The_Brillant_Paula_Bean.aspx ... she isn;t as uncommon as she may appear.

Ayende Rahien commented on Simple != Poor Quality, period!

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 19:05:51 GMT

> it is a job, not something they aspire to excel at. I disagree, because I think that a sense of professional pride is mandatory for a healthy life. I am privileged to work in a field that I love, but a lot of people don't get this chance, and work in something that they have very little personal interest in. _But_, they still take pride in doing the job right, on time, and efficiently.

Casey commented on Simple != Poor Quality, period!

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 19:04:24 GMT

This started at ALT.Net and the Enterprise ... where you wondered why these things are believed not to scale up to (for example) 100 developers. I suggested the reason was that the great majority of those developers were 'body count', hence you had to let the overall team take the common approach (which I referred to as simple). In that case, no these 'revolutionary' things won't scale, becasue you are hiring from a pool of developers that grew up with drag, drop, VB6, WebForms and Intellisence.So your options are: train 90 developers to use better techniques (while paying them) or use the things they are comfortable with and get some kind of result. Managers will almost always pickthe second. As a technical person, I aksed you how you could convine them to take a better approach, wiythout using any technical terminology.

Ayende Rahien commented on Simple != Poor Quality, period!

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 19:03:04 GMT

> Is it your contention that he should be employing skilled people, or employing people he thinks he can teach? I want to employ skilled people, but they are already employed. I have some true horror stories from interviews, if you care to search the blog for them. At this point, I no longer believe that I will find skilled people through CVs hunt, only through direct contacts, so I settled on getting people that I can teach. In the long run, there is little difference, and I don't mind investing in an employee, in fact, I think I should. As for lack of time to invest in employees, I don't have the time to fix their mistakes, frankly, so I have better pay it up front, in cash, it will be cheaper this way.

Ayende Rahien commented on Simple != Poor Quality, period!

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 18:58:51 GMT

Casey, I am not sure about you, but I certainly can't evaluate the work of a plumber or an electrician, even if I am on site and inspecting things. Let us take the electrician, since I have a good example there. You had a house built, found a electrician, he go the thing wired, and you are happy. Then you buy a dryer to go with the washing machine, and you get a total blackout. Turns out that the circuits for the basement can't handle both machines at the same time. Now take a hammer and break the walls & rewire the whole thing from scratch, sounds similar?

Ayende Rahien commented on Simple != Poor Quality, period!

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 18:55:56 GMT

Casey, I don't get where you are going, frankly. Do you want me to admit that there are people out there that are basically frauds, that they get paid good money and couldn't find a value type with a map & both hands? And that at clients who should certainly know better? Yes, they are there. If they were on my team, they would need to either straighten up or leave, I have very little problem with lack of knowledge, I have huge problem with unwillingness to learn. But, given all of that, do you suggest that I should structure the way I work in order to fit that line of thinking?

Casey commented on Simple != Poor Quality, period!

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 17:01:15 GMT

It is comments like that when I have to check if I have interviewed Jeremy before and rejected him :) I don;t think personal attacks are either very constructive or add anything to the conversation. We all agree that good code is very important, we all have to write it on a daily basis, and we all have to deliver real working solutions. Just becasue I am putting forward the deabte from the point of view of an employer means I am a "downer"? Or does it mean that there are counter viewpoints to the rosy world that you see in a place like this, where almost by definition everyone reading will pride themselves on writing high quality, maintainable code. If you believe that the vast majority of the developers in the world are here, you are sadly mistaken, most of them want to go to work, throw someting together and go home - it is a job, not something they aspire to excel at. That isn't being a downer, it is showing another side to the world.

Ayende Rahien commented on Simple != Poor Quality, period!

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 16:53:28 GMT

Avish, If you are talking about getting started, this is something that can be easily be have using project templates and documentation. You are comparing oranges to apples here, because you latched in the OR/M, IoC and MVC on one side, and responding to a single event on the other side.

Jeremy Gray commented on Simple != Poor Quality, period!

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 16:49:18 GMT

I have read through all of the comments on the last couple of posts and really am not sure how to respond succinctly other than to say: Casey, you are a total downer. If we were all to blindly follow your recommendations we might as well all just pack up and go home. Or use COBOL. :) Defeatist attitude's like Casey's are exactly why we find ourselves in a society where so many people feel an undue sense of entitlement, as if they should be able to coast through life without improving themselves, and is why our society continues to dumb everything down to the Mort level. We should have better expectations of ourselves, and heck, even if we can't have better expectations of absolutely everyone, we can certainly choose to ignore Chicken Littles like Casey, get ourselves onto good teams, choose good technology, and deliver high quality, long-lived solutions. Along the way, hopefully we can lift up those around us, and be lifted by them, as we and they all have many things to learn. Or, you could be like Casey and just give up, pack up and go home. As an aside, the industry desparately needs to kill off the term "Mort". Just look at the kinds of posts and comments we've been seeing these days. Every time "Mort" comes up, Mort gets used as an excuse to let crappy "professionals" continue to be crappy, continue to feel unduly entitled, and continue to drag the rest of us down. Die Mort, die!

Casey commented on Simple != Poor Quality, period!

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 16:38:23 GMT

>>Within a couple of month, he has a few members that can build these complex systems that are easier to use for the other (not so smart ones) << Is it your contention that he should be employing skilled people, or employing people he thinks he can teach? When I am in the position of needing to recruit, I am paying very large sums of money to people, not so that I can teach them, but so that they can do work that needs to be done. I still think that Oren is in the priviliged position of working with some exceptional people, and having the ability to spend time investing in those people he thinks are worthwhile. When I find myself on a team like that, I too am very happy and enjoy gong to work :) However, rarely on real projects is that time to teach and educate a luxury that can be afforded.

Rob Meyer commented on Simple != Poor Quality, period!

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 16:37:09 GMT

I very much see what Casey was saying. Simple code is -not- easy to write. It may be easy for everyone to read, but it's definitely not easy to implement. Beginning developers never do things the simplest way, they do them the most obvious way. It takes a lot of experience to identify and pick the simple solution out of all the possible options. Simple code is what we all strive for. If you screw up an implementation, it ends up complicated. Beginning or average developers screw up a lot, it's part of the learning process. Unless you have the luxury of very tight review/rework cycles, your code is going to continue to tend to the complicated. Does that mean I think you should punt and tell everyone to just stick everything in the code behind? Hell no. You should teach, train, push, pull and work as hard as you can to elevate the level of your team so everyone can write simple code. Otherwise you'll always be in a mess, fighting fires. Or worse, throwing away code and starting over for every new project. But the idea of "if you can't write code like this you're off the team" is not practical in most enterprise organizations. Remember, the corporate culture is not about writing software, it's about making widgets, or transporting things, or whatever the business is. Software development culture is often at odds with the culture of the core business. When you have the weight of a 40,000 employee company with hiring and evaluation processes that are designed to recruit and retain the best salespeople or managers and not developers, you have to take what you have and work hard to train and teach. Again, just to reiterate, this doesn't mean giving up. It just means it's a hard, never-ending road from where you are to where you'd love to be. Over time (2-3 years), you can notice a big improvement if you can keep your seniors around. You can _eventually_ drop off a few of the people with incompatible ideas about development, elevate the people who want to try, and retain/add enough good developers to make quality software. It's just not easy.