developer.* Magazine

Yeah, I posted elsewhere in this thread that I'm a big fan of Jack Reeves' essays on "code as design"; namely, that the code is what's important, and the design is just scaffolding. "The following essays by Jack W. Reeves offer three perspectives on a single theme, namely that programming is fundamentally a design activity and that the only final and true representation of "the design" is the source code itself. This simple assertion gives rise to a rich discussion—one which Reeves explores fully in these three essays." https://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/reeves_design_main.html

I have gotten a lot of inspiration, several times during my career, from this classic article by Jack W. Reeves (and its two follow-ups). Let cooler heads prevail. https://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/reeves_design_main.html

Agreed. Reading [1] was a fantastic eye-opener for me. The code is the design, and design is always "trying until it works". [1] http://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/reeves_design.html

There is a great essay by Jack Reeves making a similar point. What Is Software Design? http://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/reeves_design.html FTA: There is one consequence of considering code as software design that completely overwhelms all others. It is so important and so obvious that it is a total blind spot for most software organizations. This is the fact that software is cheap to build. It does not qualify as inexpensive; it is so cheap it is almost free. If source code is a software design, then actually building software is done by compilers and linkers.

Jack Reeves essays on software design are also worth a read http://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/reeves_design_main.html

Brilliant analysis! Navel gazing indeed. Typical NCA (Non-Coding Architect) stuff. This reminds me of the UML and the Model-Driven Architecture movement of the days before, where architect astronauts imagined a happy little world where you could just get away from that dirty coding, join some boxes with lines in all sorts of charts and then have that generate your code. And it will produce code you actually want to ship and that does what you want to do. This disdain for writing code is not new. This classic essay about "code as design" from 1992 (!) is still relevant today: http://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/reeves_originalletter.htm…

A tangential issue is the broken metaphor of "coding as construction", which is discussed in a classic essay by Jack Reeves: http://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/reeves_design_main.html

The point made in this article is associated with Jack Reeves' classic 1992 essay on source code as design. http://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/reeves_design.html

Agile is not a methodology or a process, it is literally[1] a set of values and principles which can be summarized by "stop being stupid and trying to reproduce what they do in construction engineering, and start discussing about the why and collaborate, doing things that matter, and being flexible, since after all, we're doing _soft_ware. The set of methodologies and processes that ensued, as well as the entire industry of coaches, consultants, evangelists and "practitioners" was probably coming from a good place - trying to propose an implementation for how to put in place those abstract values and principles, or to help with that. The commercialization, envy and corruption that followed is what the problem is. "Agile" has become a synonym for "cargo-cult brainless implementation of sprints and stand-ups to copy something called scrum but effectively doing things in a very much waterfall and old fashion that isn't even remotely close to the original intent". The problem is of semantics order. What does need to "die" is the "agile" industry, with cargo-cultish coaches whose only value is to repeat Scrum says X, XP says Y, Agile says Z, my other customers do Ω, without trying to convey the reason behind those implements ; "agile" methodos like "safe" which have very little agility backed in and whose "Enterprise Architects" proponents usually don't get any of the intent. But take a look at the manifesto[1] and tell me that you want it to die, I feel like the arguments…

someone needs more sleep:-). The question you are asking is how do you get more done, how do you be more productive? Take care of the usual suspects -- diet, exercise, sleep. Everyone needs different hours of sleep, so don't use that as a metric. The hours you are awake, make sure you are highly focused. The other things that helps me is eating a light dinner (sometimes mostly soup) taken 3-5 hours before I hit the bed. In addition, here are some excellent articles that should get you started. 1. Be an early riser: Steve Pavlina -- http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/05/how-to-become-an-early-riser/ 2. Take care of your health (diet & exercise), here's Gerry Weinberg's* notes on health: -- http://www.developerdotstar.com/printable/mag/articles/weinberg_health… 3. The Programmers’ Stone talks about meditation, diet and sleep -- http://the-programmers-stone.com/about/what-to-do-per-individual/ * -- as a side note I highly recommend Gerry's book on technical leadership & secrets of consulting good luck!

This is laid out in “the code is the design” - https://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/reeves_design_main.html by jack reeves. Like they say “everything comes round again”

Code can be viewed as design [1]. By this view, generating code using LLMs is a low-effort, low-value activity. [1] Code as design, essays by Jack Reeves: https://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/reeves_design_main.html

the source code is the design; it plays the same role that schematics or mechanical drawings play for products made by electronic technicians or machinists. the difference is that compilers take the place of technicians or machinists, and that confuses people, often for political/ideological reasons see jack w. reeves's 'code as design' series, beginning with 'what is software design?' from 01992, for a fuller explanation https://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/reeves_design.html https://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/reeves_originalletter.ht… https://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/reeves_13yearslater.html… and the discussion on wiki https://wiki.c2.com/?TheSourceCodeIsTheDesign=

https://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/read_princprog.html https://www.mit.edu/~xela/tao.html

This point was recognized quite early. there is an influential article by Jack W. Reeves from 1992 [1] that looks at the manufacturing analogy and argues that "the code is the design" whereas the "manufacturing" is just the compilation and packaging (that is, super cheap and automated). I believe it‘s this line of thinking that inspired Agile practices, where software developers are seen as engineers rather than code monkeys. [1]: https://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/reeves_design.html

People who are uncomfortable with the views expressed in this paper regarding the actual actions that software engineers perform might like http://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/reeves_design.html and also "managing the design factory" by reinertsen.

I agree with you. The Programming is Design position was elucidated very nicely by Jack Reeves in his paper "What Is Software Design?" some time ago. http://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/reeves_design_main.html Not realizing that programming is a design task has led to a lot of problems in many projects.

The idea that code is the design and it's the compiler doing the construction has been around for quite a long time: http://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/reeves_design_main.html

It sounds like you're saying something similar to this: http://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/reeves_design.html

some in depth points on that criticism. http://www.developerdotstar.com/community/node/781 disclaimer, i haven't read the book. but if teaching cpp while he was really teaching C was his crime, than i will probably be on his side when i do read the book :)

Software actually does not fall into that category. What that category means is "magazine article." If you go further down in the page, you'll also note that one of the other stipulations is that there is an explicit written contract stating that is a work for hire. this page probably explains the situation better than my random comments: http://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/daniels_softwarecopyright…

Where exactly am I wrong? Point the sentence. Of course you have to assign them IP! That's what they're paying you for! Ever contracted for the government?! Look at their 20 page assignment agreement. http://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/daniels_softwarecopyright…

Who remembers Model-Driven Architecture and code generation from UML? Nothing can replace code, because code is design[1]. Low-code came about as a solution to the insane clickfest of no-code. And what is low-code? It’s code over a boilerplate-free appropriately-high level of abstraction. This reminds me of the 1st chapter of the Clean Architecture book[2], pages 5 and 6, which shows a chart of engineering staff growing from tens to 1200 and yet the product line count (as a simple estimate of features) asymptotically stops growing, barely growing in lines of code from 300 staff to 1200 staff. As companies grow and throw more staff at the problem, software architecture is often neglected, dramatically slowing development (due to massive overhead required to implement features). Some companies decided that the answer is to optimize for hiring lots of junior engineers to write dumbed down code full of boilerplate (e.g. Go). The hard part is staying on top of the technical (architectural and design) debt to make sure that feature development is efficient. That is the hard job and the true value of a software architect, not writing design documents. [1] https://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/reeves_originalletter.ht… A timeless article from 1992, pre-UML, but references precursors like Booch and object diagrams, as well as CASE tools [2] You can read it here in Amazon sample chapter: https://read.amazon.com/sample/0134494164?clientId=share