Better than POSIX? [LWN.net]

Better than POSIX?

Posted Mar 26, 2009 10:56 UTC (Thu) by massimiliano (subscriber, #3048)
In reply to: Better than POSIX? by rahvin
Parent article: Better than POSIX?

That is one explanation.

Another one is that we don't have an "engineering culture" in software development.

I mean, software developers are not necessarily engineers, so they rarely know about issues like steam boiler management.
But most importantly, a software developer is seldom trained to think at an engineering level. I remember when I studied for my degree, I have been taught about power plants, engines, turbines, cooling plants, pipes, dissipators... none of that has anything to do directly with software development. But after a few years of studying those systems it becomes obvious that there are lots of analogies between them, and very often the mathematical models that describe them are the same.
The teachers themselves pointed this out every time they could, and they did it on purpose, to teach us to recognize the patterns.

Now, I'm not claiming engineers are necessarily better than others in this sense. I know many guys who quit college and they are better than me in understanding aspects of different technologies.

What I'm claiming is that very often people reinvent the wheel not because the previous wheel was a secret, but because they do not have this "engineering culture" of knowing different kinds of wheels in advance, and being able to understand correctly in which ways they are similar and when they are relevant.

And without going to different disciplines, how many software developers have a good "culture" about the basic concepts needed in their job, like recurrent algorithms and patterns?
I mean, how many actually tried to read Donald Knuth's books (or similar ones), or at least consult them when appropriate? There are lots of answers already published, but we continue reinventing them anyway...

My 2c,
Massimiliano

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Better than POSIX?

Posted Mar 27, 2009 1:01 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

HEAR HEAR.

I'd estimate that I spend 20% of my time at work ripping out people's
buggy broken slow reimplementations of wheels and replacing them with a
wheel that uses twenty-to-forty-year-old techniques to do the same thing
faster and more reliably.

(And do the reimplementations stop? No! I ditched a chained hash table
implementation today which had a stupid bug which led to every element
landing in the same bucket. Obviously it was too hard to look
in "include/hash.h" to find that there was already a hash table in the
system with a better API...)

I mean it's not as if computers are bad at searching for things, but half
the people I work with are tentative and reluctant to just grep for a few
plausible terms to see if they can avoid reinventing the damn wheel yet
again.

Pride

Posted Mar 27, 2009 5:49 UTC (Fri) by quotemstr (subscriber, #45331) [Link]

One explanation behind all these square wheels is the phase every programmer goes through during which he overestimates his abilities, has no sense of scale, and lacks sense for robustness. In short, he's proud, ignorant, and dangerous. He believes that libraries are bloated and slow, that he can out-perform standard implementations. He optimized prematurely, avoids function calls, abuses the ternary operator, and doesn't use a profiler.

Eventually, these programmers grow up, but in the meantime, they've written a significant amount of horrible code. I've seen this pattern again and again. As the parent mentioned, software developers have no "engineering culture." I imagine that in more established engineering disciplines, students have the above attitude beaten out of them before they graduate.