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0 pointsnostrademons12y ago0 comments

I'm curious just what definition you're using for "crumbling foundation". Is it that old software doesn't break on it, in which case PHP/HHVM/Hack isn't a crumbling foundation either - Facebook is built on it, and Facebook is clearly still running.

Or is it that maintenance is difficult and programmers will run into all sorts of ugly corner cases and features that are just grafted onto each other? Because those apply to C and C++ and Win32 and Google and basically every other large software system as well. That's the point the grandparent is making - if you look at pretty much any successful, evolving software system under the hood, you'll see a byzantine mess of complexity, and it's a wonder that it ever works.

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Silhouette12y ago· 4 in thread

I didn't have some some specific, technical definition in mind, but if I were to try and pin it down, perhaps in software terms it would be something like "a dependency that is unreliable in the long term".

Clearly this isn't an absolute scale. As our industry evolves and we develop more reliable ways to achieve our goals, something that we regarded as being a relatively stable foundation in the past may no longer be regarded as such in the future when our standards have risen. Moreover, what constitutes "long term" might vary wildly among different projects.

I suppose my basic objection to the original claim (that building atop crumbling foundations is by far the most successful way to accomplish anything in computing) is that significant achievements in computing tend not to happen overnight but rather to develop over time, and the more stable your foundations, the better chance your project has of developing far enough to achieve significant things.

nostrademonsOP12y ago

If you define "crumbling foundations" as "a dependency that is unreliable in the long term", then your conclusion is circular. Of course no long-term products will be built on crumbling foundations, because if a technology stack has long-term successes then, by your definition, it is not a crumbling foundation.

I think the other posters are using a definition of "crumbling foundation" as "one which most engineers hate, which slows them down through excess complexity". And by that definition, almost all successful projects are built on crumbling foundations, because the fact that the project was successful leads you to add features to it, and adapt it in ways that the original architecture didn't anticipate. This process only ends when the software becomes so complex that all further attempts at modification fail, at which point everybody hates the codebase and it is, by pretty much any definition, a "crumbling foundation".

dasil00312y ago

I think it's funny that this whole thread is based on the initial haphazard word choice of reikonomusha yet he is not even a participant in the debate.

Silhouette12y ago

If you define "crumbling foundations" as "a dependency that is unreliable in the long term", then your conclusion is circular.

Not at all. I'm arguing that in computing, worthwhile results often take time to achieve, and therefore that foundations that are likely to be around for longer will improve the chances of achieving such results. Alternatively, from the opposite point of view, the odds of achieving something worthwhile go down significantly if you have only a short time time to achieve it, as inevitably you will if you are building on foundations that aren't themselves going to be around for long (whatever we choose to call them).

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coldtea12y ago

>I didn't have some some specific, technical definition in mind, but if I were to try and pin it down, perhaps in software terms it would be something like "a dependency that is unreliable in the long term"

In this case you are mostly hand-waving, and what you say amounts to "I don't like X language".

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