←back to thread

1455 points nromiun | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.788s | source
Show context
Buttons840 ◴[] No.45074873[source]
I'm probably one of the "smart developers" with quirks. I try to build abstractions.

I'm both bothered and intrigued by the industry returning to, what I call, "pile-of-if-statements architecture". It's really easy to think it's simple, and it's really easy to think you understand, and it's really easy to close your assigned Jira tickets; so I understand why people like it.

People get assigned a task, they look around and find a few places they think are related, then add some if-statements to the pile. Then they test; if the tests fail they add a few more if-statements. Eventually they send it to QA; if QA finds a problem, another quick if-statement will solve the problem. It's released to production, and it works for a high enough percentage of cases that the failure cases don't come to your attention. There's approximately 0% chance the code is actually correct. You just add if-statements until you asymptotically approach correctness. If you accidentally leak the personal data of millions of people, you wont be held responsible, and the cognitive load is always low.

But the thing is... I'm not sure there's a better alternative.

You can create a fancy abstraction and use a fancy architecture, but I'm not sure this actually increases the odds of the code being correct.

Especially in corporate environments--you cannot build a beautiful abstraction in most corporate environments because the owners of the business logic do not treat the business logic with enough care.

"A single order ships to a single address, keep it simple, build it, oh actually, a salesman promised a big customer, so now we need to make it so a single order can ship to multiple addresses"--you've heard something like this before, haven't you?

You can't build careful bug-free abstractions in corporate environments.

So, is pile-of-if-statements the best we can do for business software?

replies(23): >>45074916 #>>45074936 #>>45074945 #>>45075059 #>>45075089 #>>45075095 #>>45075106 #>>45075135 #>>45075188 #>>45075195 #>>45075392 #>>45075443 #>>45075463 #>>45075515 #>>45075547 #>>45075846 #>>45076426 #>>45077189 #>>45077500 #>>45077548 #>>45078893 #>>45079553 #>>45080494 #
1. djtango ◴[] No.45075392[source]
IMO you touch on the real heart of the issue at the end - the real world and business is messy and really _is_ just a pile of if statements.

When the problem itself is technical or can be generalised then abstractions can eliminate the need for 1000s of if-statement developers but if the domain itself is messy and poorly specified then the only ways abstractions (and tooling) can help is to bake in flexibility, because contradiction might be a feature not a bug...

replies(1): >>45076954 #
2. dehrmann ◴[] No.45076954[source]
In most assembly languages, the instructions are essentially load and store, arithmetic operations, and branch and jump. Almost everything is abstractions around how to handle branching and memory.
replies(1): >>45081820 #
3. djtango ◴[] No.45081820[source]
Right and a compiler is mostly technical.