A couple are well-described/covered in books, e.g., Tesler's Law (Conservation of Complexity) is at the core of _A Philosophy of Software Design_ by John Ousterhout
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/39996759-a-philosophy...
(and of course Brook's Law is from _The Mythical Man Month_)
Curious if folks have recommendations for books which are not as well-known which cover these, other than the _Laws of Software Engineering_ book which the site is an advertisement for.....
"In analyzing complexity, fast iteration almost always produces better results than in-depth analysis."
Boyd invented the OODA loop.
complexity(system) =
sum(complexity(component) * time_spent_working_in(component)
for component in system).
> complexity is not a function of time spent working on something.
But the complexity you observe is a function of your exposure to that complexity.
The notion of complexity exists to quantify the degree of struggle required to achieve some end. Ousterhout’s observation is that if you can move complexity into components far away from where you must do your work to achieve your ends, you no longer need to struggle with that complexity, and thus it effectively is not there anymore.
https://lawsofsoftwareengineering.com/laws/premature-optimiz...
It leaves out this part from Knuth:
>The improvement in speed from Example 2 to Example 2a is only about 12%, and many people would pronounce that insignificant. The conventional wisdom shared by many of today’s software engineers calls for ignoring efficiency in the small; but I believe this is simply an overreaction to the abuses they see being practiced by penny-wise- and-pound-foolish programmers, who can’t debug or maintain their “optimized” programs. In established engineering disciplines a 12% improvement, easily obtained, is never considered marginal; and I believe the same viewpoint should prevail in software engineering. Of course I wouldn’t bother making such optimizations on a one-shot job, but when it’s a question of preparing quality programs, I don’t want to restrict myself to tools that deny me such efficiencies.
Knuth thought an easy 12% was worth it, but most people who quote him would scoff at such efforts.
Moreover:
>Knuth’s Optimization Principle captures a fundamental trade-off in software engineering: performance improvements often increase complexity. Applying that trade-off before understanding where performance actually matters leads to unreadable systems.
I suppose there is a fundamental tradeoff somewhere, but that doesn't mean you're actually at the Pareto frontier, or anywhere close to it. In many cases, simpler code is faster, and fast code makes for simpler systems.
For example, you might write a slow program, so you buy a bunch more machines and scale horizontally. Now you have distributed systems problems, cache problems, lots more orchestration complexity. If you'd written it to be fast to begin with, you could have done it all on one box and had a much simpler architecture.
Most times I hear people say the "premature optimization" quote, it's just a thought-terminating cliche.
Or develop a skill to make it correct, fast and pretty in one or two approaches.
- Write a correct, pretty implementation
- Beat Claude Code with a stick for 20 minutes until it generated a fragile, unmaintainable mess that still happened to produce the same result but in 300ms rather than 2500ms. (In this step, explicitly prompting it to test rather than just philosophising gets you really far)
- Pull across the concepts and timesaves from Claude's mess into the pretty code.
Seriously, these new models are actually really good at reasoning about performance and knowing alternative solutions or libraries that you might have only just discovered yourself.
But yes, the scope and breadth of their knowledge goes far beyond what a human brain can handle. How many relevant facts can you hold in your mind when solving a problem? 5? 12? An LLM can take thousands of relevant facts into account at the same time, and that's their superhuman ability.
I've seen CompSci guys especially (I'm EEE background, we have our own problems but this ain't one of them) launch conceptual complexity into the stratosphere just so that they could avoid writing two separate functions that do similar things.
The goal ought to be to aim for a local minima of all of these qualities.
Some people just want to toss DRY away entirely though or be uselessly vague about when to apply it ("use it when it makes sense") and thats not really much better than being a DRY fundamentalist.
A common "failure" of DRY is coupling together two things that only happened to bear similarity while they were both new, and then being unable to pick them apart properly later.
Take the 5 Rings approach.
The purpose of the blade is to cut down your opponent.
The purpose of software is to provide value to the customer.
It's the only thing that matters.
You can also philosophize why people with blades needed to cut down their opponents along with why we have to provide value to the customer but thats beyond the scope of this comment
> Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.
Anyway, the list seems like something AI scraped and has a strong bias towards "gotcha" comments from the likes of reddit.
9. Most software will get at most one major rewrite in its lifetime.
Look, I understand the intent you have, and I also understand the frustration at the lack of care with which many companies have acted with regards to personal data. I get it, I'm also frustrated.
But (it's a big but)...
Your suggestion is that we hold people legally responsible and culpable for losing a confrontation against another motivated, capable, and malicious party.
That's... a seriously, seriously, different standard than holding someone responsible for something like not following best practices, or good policy.
It's the equivalent of killing your general when he loses a battle.
And the problem is that sometimes even good generals lose battles, not because they weren't making an honest effort to win, or being careless, but because they were simply outmatched.
So to be really, really blunt - your proposal basically says that any software company should be legally responsible for not being able to match the resources of a nation-state that might want to compromise their data. That's not good policy, period.
Structure code so that in an ideal case, removing a functionality should be as simple as deleting a directory or file.
For example, each comment on HN has a line on top that contains buttons like "parent", "prev", "next", "flag", "favorite", etc. depending on context. Suppose I might one day want to remove the "flag" functionality. Should each button be its own file? What about the "comment header" template file that references each of those button templates?
grahar64•1h ago
stingraycharles•55m ago
It’s not a great list. The good old c2.com has many more, better ones.
layer8•3m ago