This made me think of the wisdom of learning between Confucius and Laozi in ancient Chinese philosophy.
Confucius treats learning as cultivation: you do not really know something just because you were instructed in it. You know it by practicing, reflecting, making mistakes, and gradually developing judgment.
Laozi gives the complementary warning: “In pursuing learning, every day something is added. In pursuing the Tao, every day something is dropped.” Mastery is not only accumulation. It is also subtraction: removing unnecessary abstraction, ceremony, cleverness, and control.
Software architecture seems to need both. You learn it in a Confucian sense, by doing real work and living with the consequences. You improve it in a Taoist sense, by noticing when the system has accumulated structure that no longer serves the people, incentives, and constraints that actually shape it.
That is why the article’s point about incentives resonates. Architecture is not just what you design on paper. It is what survives contact with the organization that produces and maintains it.
I would like to spend my time more on gaining a mental model of the projects I work on, but I get very demotivated if I start disliking things like the programming language, certain arch. Choices or anything that gets too complex that doesn't seem like its worth my time
It's heavily dependent on the project, but I feel like working as a "fullstack dev" kind of removes the fun of programming. I'm already spending 40 hrs a week looking at the most dull project I can imagine
I think this really down plays the value of mental model or strategies for organizing code. Take a compiler: often described as a sequence of transformations on an AST, taken to the extreme in the nanopass framework. That's a really useful mental model, and you can extract that model and apply it in other contexts. For example, many business applications are a sequence of transformations on JSON. So they're basically compilers. That can be good architecture in the right situation.
You don't have to call a sequence of transformations a compiler. You can say your AST is an algebraic data type, and your transformations are folds (or structural recursions; same thing). Now you have an abstract model that isn't tied to a particular application, and you can more easily find uses for it.
If you know a bit of maths you might wonder about duals. You will find codata---objects---are the dual of algebraic data. Ok, now we're programming to interfaces. That's also useful in the right context. What's the dual of a fold? An unfold! So now we have another way of looking at transformations, from the point of view of what they produce instead of what they consume. At this point we've basically reinvented reactive programming. And on and on it goes.
You can find most of this in the literature, just not usually presented in a compact and easy to understand form.
(Note, the above description is very quick sketch and I'm not expecting anyone to understand all the details from it alone.)
This made me think of the wisdom of learning between Confucius and Laozi in ancient Chinese philosophy.
Confucius treats learning as cultivation: you do not really know something just because you were instructed in it. You know it by practicing, reflecting, making mistakes, and gradually developing judgment.
Laozi gives the complementary warning: “In pursuing learning, every day something is added. In pursuing the Tao, every day something is dropped.” Mastery is not only accumulation. It is also subtraction: removing unnecessary abstraction, ceremony, cleverness, and control.
Software architecture seems to need both. You learn it in a Confucian sense, by doing real work and living with the consequences. You improve it in a Taoist sense, by noticing when the system has accumulated structure that no longer serves the people, incentives, and constraints that actually shape it.
That is why the article’s point about incentives resonates. Architecture is not just what you design on paper. It is what survives contact with the organization that produces and maintains it.
"code on, code off"
I would like to spend my time more on gaining a mental model of the projects I work on, but I get very demotivated if I start disliking things like the programming language, certain arch. Choices or anything that gets too complex that doesn't seem like its worth my time
It's heavily dependent on the project, but I feel like working as a "fullstack dev" kind of removes the fun of programming. I'm already spending 40 hrs a week looking at the most dull project I can imagine
The Gary Bernhardt talk is truly special. Lots of concepts which will lead you to other interesting places
I think this really down plays the value of mental model or strategies for organizing code. Take a compiler: often described as a sequence of transformations on an AST, taken to the extreme in the nanopass framework. That's a really useful mental model, and you can extract that model and apply it in other contexts. For example, many business applications are a sequence of transformations on JSON. So they're basically compilers. That can be good architecture in the right situation.
You don't have to call a sequence of transformations a compiler. You can say your AST is an algebraic data type, and your transformations are folds (or structural recursions; same thing). Now you have an abstract model that isn't tied to a particular application, and you can more easily find uses for it.
If you know a bit of maths you might wonder about duals. You will find codata---objects---are the dual of algebraic data. Ok, now we're programming to interfaces. That's also useful in the right context. What's the dual of a fold? An unfold! So now we have another way of looking at transformations, from the point of view of what they produce instead of what they consume. At this point we've basically reinvented reactive programming. And on and on it goes.
You can find most of this in the literature, just not usually presented in a compact and easy to understand form.
(Note, the above description is very quick sketch and I'm not expecting anyone to understand all the details from it alone.)
Shameless self promotion: the book I'm writing is about all these concepts. You can find it here: https://functionalprogrammingstrategies.com/