This is so true.
Even if you do design clean modular code and document it, you’re getting a question a year from now about how it works, or someone just duct tapes on top of it.
I’ve even experienced this in the 3D printing community, where I design a highly parametric model and put lots of effort into making all of the major dimensions and qualities parameterized and dynamically adjustable, with lots of bounds checking and value clamping, with all the parameters at the top of my scad file with comments explaining what each variable does.
And then someone comes along to remix my model, says I don’t want to install openscad, and just scales the entire output stl to change the dimensions, squashing all the features of the model in the process (instead of having the size gracefully adjust with all the features moving around to account), and leaving anybody starting from their work with a hard to remix mesh with no parameters.
The ‘document’ part also seems to be insanely hit-or-miss from my amateur experience. Self-documenting design/code is… well, not. Auto-generated documentation is also usually just as bad IMO. Producing good documentation really is a skill in and of itself.
Also small personal opinion: If your abstraction layers or algorithms are based off a technical concept, you should probably attribute that concept and provide links to further research, to eliminate future ambiguity or in case your reader lacks that background. Future you will probably thank you and anyone like me who immediately gets lost in jargon soup will also be thankful.
Have you ever been in an old house? Not old, like, on the Historic Register, well-preserved, rich bastard “old house”. Just a house that has been around awhile. A place that has seen a lot of living.
You’ll find light switches that don’t connect to anything; artwork hiding holes in the walls; sometimes walls have been added or removed and the floors no longer match.
Any construction that gets used, must change as needs change. Be it a house or a city or a program, these evolutions of need inevitably introduce complexity and flaws that are large enough to annoy, but small enough to ignore. Over time those issues accumulate until they reach a crisis point. Houses get remodeled or torn down, cities build or remove highways, and programs get refactored or replaced.
You can and should design for change, within reason, because all successful programs will need to change in ways you cannot predict. But the fact that a system eventually becomes complex and flawed is not due to engineering failures - it is inherent in the nature of changing systems.
My 100 year old house has marks on the floor that look like it was worn from a door swinging. Very distinctive arc pattern. Like it was there for many years and was under frequent use.
The problem is that there’s no door there, just a wall, which is also the edge of a dormer…so if there were a door there it would just open out onto a sloping roof.
Every time I register it I contemplate why it’s there and wtf happened.
the fact that a system eventually becomes complex and flawed is not due to engineering failures - it is inherent in the nature of changing systems
it is not. It’s just that there will be some point, where you need significant effort to keep the systems structure up to the new demands {1}. I find the debt-metaphor is quite apt [2]: In your scenario the debt accumulates until it’s easier to start fresh. But you can also manage your debt and keep going indefinitily. But in contrast to financial debt, paying of technical debt is much less obvious. First of all it is pretty much impossible to put any kind of exact number on it. On the other hand, it’s very hard to tell what you actually should do to pay it off. (tangent: This is why experienced engineers are worth so much: (among other things) they have seen how debt evolves over time, and may see the early signs).
[1] https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/the-openclosedopen-principle
You’ll find light switches that don’t connect to anything
My house was built in the 1960s and had a switch like this. I was always curious what the switch was actually doing. One day, I was replacing all the light switches with smart switches, and discovered that the switch didn’t even had a load connected to it! It was literally doing nothing.
I was perplexed by this until I saw some old photos of the house, from the early 2010s when the previous owners bought it. It turned out that there were originally ceiling lights in the room (George Nelson bubble lamps, fitting the mid-century modern design of the house) that were removed at some point, and the switch was left behind. I had an electrician install recessed lights in most rooms, and they found old wires for the old lights. It wasn’t actually proper power cabling though… They had used speaker cables to power the lights!
I used to work summers as an apprentice electrician. The amount of crazy wiring I saw in old houses was (heh) shocking. Sometimes it was just that it was old. Real old houses sometimes just had bare wire wrapped in silk. … And a few decades later that silk was frayed and crumbling in the walls and needed replacing.
My current house was wired at a time when copper was more precious, so it was wired up and down through the house, with circuits arranged by proximity, not necessarily logic. When a certain circuit in my house blows the breaker, my TV, PC and one wall of the master bedroom all lose power. The TV and PC are not in the same room either.
My hallway has a light like this that was removed from what I can only guess was water damage and the accompanying upstairs bathroom renovation.
It’s astounding to me that they would go through the trouble of renovating the bathroom, but not have reinstalled the light so that the hallway isn’t a dark safety hazard… 😒
You can and should design for change, within reason, because all successful programs will need to change in ways you cannot predict
You’ve yourself here. You can not predict how it wull change. Which means that whichever design for change you’ve made, may just as well completely miss the future utilization
Which doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t design for change at all… Just saying.
You can build your systems with as few assumptions as possible. The fewer assumptions you make, the less probable it is that any of your future assumptions will conflict with your previous assumptions. Your code will be built for change.
If your API call to some external system assumes the existence of a particular button in the UI, then your system isn’t built for change. Maybe you want to change this button? Then you need to go through all places in the code that relies on this particular button to see if it doesn’t conflict with any of their assumptions.
As long as loose coupling, and separation of concerns are well tinkered into your application you minimise risks of breaking everything on a restructuring.
If you have for example shared state leaking everywhere into the program, your most probably doomed on the slitest changes.
I am not saying you’re wrong, but there are ways to mitigate the risks even without knowing what will happen in the future.
Just saying.
… Saying what, exactly?
I said that we should
- design for change
- “within reason”
- because we can’t know what exact changes are needed.
And you argued… The same thing? Just in the reverse order?
You can design it to be changeable at all, though.
In the simplest case that’s just proper abstractions. You can’t change details in the rest controller, if the persistence layer absolutely needs to call methods from the rest controller for no reason.
Finding the right balance between YOLO and YAGNI is almost impossible to get right. But you can at least try not to land on the extremes.
public class AbstractBeanVisitorStrategyFactoryBuilderIteratorAdapterProviderObserverGeneratorDecorator { // boilerplate goes here }
Why do you have access to my project??
… And can you fix it?
============ Top 5: =============== HasThisTypePatternTriedToSneakInSomeGenericOrParameterizedTypePatternMatchingStuffAnywhereVisitor: 97
AbstractAnnotationConfigDispatcherServletInitializer: 52
AbstractInterruptibleBatchPreparedStatementSetter: 49
AbstractInterceptorDrivenBeanDefinitionDecorator: 48
GenericInterfaceDrivenDependencyInjectionAspect: 47============ Factories: ===============
DefaultListableBeanFactory$DependencyObjectFactory
ObjectFactoryCreatingFactoryBean
SimpleBeanFactoryAwareAspectInstanceFactory
SingletonBeanFactoryLocator$BeanFactoryGroup
ConnectionFactoryUtils$ResourceFactory
DefaultListableBeanFactory$DependencyProviderFactory
ObjectFactoryCreatingFactoryBean$TargetBeanObjectFactory
JndiObjectFactoryBean$JndiObjectProxyFactory
DefaultListableBeanFactory$SerializedBeanFactoryReference
AbstractEntityManagerFactoryBean$SerializedEntityManagerFactoryBeanReference
BeanFactoryAspectInstanceFactory
SingletonBeanFactoryLocator$CountingBeanFactoryReference
TransactionAwarePersistenceManagerFactoryProxy$PersistenceManagerFactoryInvocationHandler
AbstractEntityManagerFactoryBean$ManagedEntityManagerFactoryInvocationHandler
There is nothing more permanent than a temporary solution that works
In my first month at my current employer, I added some temporary code with a TODO to fix it properly. That was 11 years ago in 2013, and the same TODO is still there today, and these days it’d be significantly harder to do it. 😂
If it gets comitted to master, TODO means never do.
The only thing that has the chance to prevent unmaintainable garbage code is a plethora of linting rules.
That may lead to over-refactoring, leading to unmaintainable garbage code.
yeah thats why I said it only has the chance, not that it leads to good code
In my experience it doesn’t matter. You have to regularly refactor your code to keep up with new features. The more often you can make time to do it the easier it is.
This, to a point.
Other things help :
- Unit test to help catch regressions. If you are confident in your test catching a good portion of bugs from refactoring, at least you feel confident refactoring. Worst case, at least you ensured your code is testable. There is nothing worse than refactoring untestable code.
- Self-documenting code and when it fails to self-document, comments or refer to a wiki page.
Can’t relate
I feel this personally today. I just looked at some code in a module where it started out with nice, short functions with good names. I looked back at it today, and it now has a 180 line mega function full of nested conditionals and I don’t know how this happened.
Huh? Hexagonal Architecture?
Onion architecture. Ports and adapters are other names for it, I think.
It’s an idea by the same guy who wrote the clean code book