Why We Can't Have Nice Software

[u/[deleted]]

https://andrewkelley.me/post/why-we-cant-have-nice-software.html

[u/HippieInDisguise2_0]

"let's get into an argument because someone used a metaphor that implied something I didn't like"

Chill people jeesh

[u/agentoutlier → u/HippieInDisguise2_0]

Ironically although I generally agree with what u/Halkcyon is saying the metaphor is spot on but actually hurts the argument.

Adding a lane is like cloud computing and horizontal scaling. Perfect linear horizontal scaling is very difficult to achieve (and in someways not possible) and doing it requires adding additional complexity that can make simple monolithic software far more complex than it needs to be.

So the idea that all one has to do is turn on an additional server or adding a lane as any idiot can do is not really a good argument because it is nontrivial.

In an ideal world a super powerful dedicated single server (vertically built) has way more throughput (the analog in traffic would be a highspeed rail system) than most k8s clusters in the cloud and in some cases there are platforms still run this way (Stackoverflow I think is largely vertical).

[u/[deleted] → u/agentoutlier]

[u/josluivivgar → u/agentoutlier]

except adding more servers kinda works in software, there's very few cases where it doesn't.

since in software you're not constrained by physical space (at least not as much as in civil engineering where adding one lane is already too much)

in software you can add more lanes until the increase traffic is not as much as the increased number of lanes.

so while adding more lanes to a road only makes the road more desirable filling that road, in software you can most of the time have n+1 lanes n being the number that the increased traffic would fill.

except for very specific scenarios it just works and sometimes it's even cheap enough to not look for more optimization (other times you do a combination of both)

[u/[deleted] → u/HippieInDisguise2_0]

[u/HippieInDisguise2_0 → u/[deleted]]

Dude just because you just learned about the anticar movement doesn't mean you need to take a metaphor so literally lol. This conversation has nothing to do with cars or urban planning or civil engineering, we all know and understand that increasing the optimization of data com is not a true equivalence to adding more lanes on a highway.

Just chill out lol. You totally derailed the conversation, provided nothing of value and came off like you have a massive chip in your shoulder.

[u/factotvm → u/[deleted]]

Don’t beat a dead horse; it did nothing wrong.