Discipline Doesn’t Scale

If programmers were just more disciplined, more professional, they’d write better software. All they need is a code of conduct telling them how to work like those of us who’ve worked it out.

The above statement is true, which is a good thing for those of us interested in improving the state of software and in helping our fellow professionals to improve their craft. However, it’s also very difficult and inefficient to apply, in addition to being entirely unnecessary. In the common parlance of our industry, “discipline doesn’t scale”.

Consider the trajectory of object lifecycle management in the Objective-C programming language, particularly the NeXT dialect. Between 1989 and 1995, the dominant way to deal with the lifecycle of objects was to use the +new and -free methods, which work much like malloc/free in C or new/delete in C++. Of course it’s possible to design a complex object graph using this ownership model, it just needs discipline, that’s all. Learn the heuristics that the experts use, and the techniques to ensure correctness, and get it correct.

But you know what’s better? Not having to get that right. So around 1994 people introduced new tools to do it an easier way: reference counting. With NeXTSTEP Mach Kit’s NXReference protocol and OpenStep’s NSObject, developers no longer need to know when everybody in an app is done with an object to destroy it. They can indicate when a reference is taken and when it’s relinquished, and the object itself will see when it’s no longer used and free itself. Learn the heuristics and techniques around auto releasing and unretained references, and get it correct.

But you know what’s better? Not having to get that right. So a couple of other tools were introduced, so close together that they were probably developed in parallel[*]: Objective-C 2.0 garbage collection (2006) and Automatic Reference Counting (2008). ARC “won” in popular adoption so let’s focus there: developers no longer need to know exactly when to retain, release, or autorelease objects. Instead of describing the edges of the relationships, they describe the meanings of the relationships and the compiler will automatically take care of ownership tracking. Learn the heuristics and techniques around weak references and the “weak self” dance, and get it correct.

[*] I’m ignoring here the significantly earlier integration of the Boehm conservative GC with Objective-C, because so did everybody else. That in itself is an important part of the technology adoption story.

But you know what’s better? You get the idea. You see similar things happen in other contexts: for example C++’s move from new/delete to smart pointers follows a similar trajectory over a similar time. The reliance on an entire programming community getting some difficult rules right, when faced with the alternative of using different technology on the same computer that follows the rules for you, is a tough sell.

It seems so simple: computers exist to automate repetitive information-processing tasks. Requiring programmers who have access to computers to recall and follow repetitive information processes is wasteful, when the computer can do that. So give those tasks to the computers.

And yet, for some people the problem with software isn’t a lack of automation but a lack of discipline. Software would be better if only people knew the rules, honoured them, and slowed themselves down so that instead of cutting corners they just chose to ignore important business milestones instead. Back in my day, everybody knew “no Markdown around town” and “don’t code in an IDE after Labour Day”, but now the kids do whatever they want. The motivations seem different, and I’d like to sort them out.

Let’s start with hazing. A lot of the software industry suffers from “I had to go through this, you should too”. Look at software engineering interviews, for example. I’m not sure whether anybody actually believes “I had to deal with carefully ensuring NUL-termination to avoid buffer overrun errors so you should too”, but I do occasionally still hear people telling less-experienced developers that they should learn C to learn more about how their computer works. Your computer is not a fast PDP-11, all you will learn is how the C virtual machine works.

Just as Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche, so real programmers don’t use Pascal. Real Programmers use FORTRAN. This motivation for sorting discipline from rabble is based on the idea that if it isn’t at least as hard as it was when I did this, it isn’t hard enough. And that means that the goalposts are movable, based on the orator’s experience.

This is often related to the term of their experience: you don’t need TypeScript to write good React Native code, just Javascript and some discipline. You don’t need React Native to write good front-end code, just JQuery and some discipline. You don’t need JQuery…

But along with the term of experience goes the breadth. You see, the person who learned reference counting in 1995 and thinks that you can only really understand programming if you manually type out your own reference-changing events, presumably didn’t go on to use garbage collection in Java in 1996. The person who thinks you can only really write correct software if every case is accompanied by a unit test presumably didn’t learn Eiffel. The person who thinks that you can only really design systems if you use the Haskell type system may not have tried OCaml. And so on.

The conclusion is that for this variety of disciplinarian, the appropriate character and quantity of discipline is whatever they had to deal with at some specific point in their career. Probably a high point: after they’d got over the tricky bits and got productive, and after you kids came along and ruined everything.

Sometimes the reason for suggesting the disciplined approach is entomological in nature, as in the case of the eusocial insect the “performant” which, while not a real word, exists in greater quantities in older software than in newer software, apparently. The performant is capable of making software faster, or use less memory, or more concurrent, or less dependent on I/O: the specific characteristics of the performant depend heavily on context.

The performant is often not talked about in the same sentences as its usual companion species, the irrelevant. Yes, there may be opportunities to shave a few percent off the runtime of that algorithm by switching from the automatic tool to the manual, disciplined approach, but does that matter (yet, or at all)? There are software-construction domains where specific performance characteristics are desirable, indeed that’s true across a lot of software. But it’s typical to focus performance-enhancing techniques on the bits where they enhance performance that needs enhancing, not to adopt them across the whole system on the basis that it was better when everyone worked this way. You might save a few hundred cycles writing native software instead of using a VM for that UI method, but if it’s going to run after a network request completes over EDGE then trigger a 1/3s animation, nobody will notice the improvement.

Anyway, whatever the source, the problem with calls for discipline is that there’s no strong motivation to become more disciplined. I can use these tools, and my customer is this much satisfied, and my employer pays me this much. Or I can learn from you how I’m supposed to be doing it, which will slow me down, for…your satisfaction? So you know I’m doing it the way it’s supposed to be done? Or so that I can tell everyone else that they’re doing it wrong, too? Sounds like a great deal.

Therefore discipline doesn’t scale. Whenever you ask some people to slow down and think harder about what they’re doing, some fraction of them will. Some will wonder whether there’s some other way to get what you’re peddling, and may find it. Some more will not pay any attention. The dangerous ones are the ones who thought they were paying attention and yet still end up not doing the disciplined thing you asked for: they either torpedo your whole idea or turn it into not doing the thing (see OOP, Agile, Functional Programming). And still more people, by far the vast majority, just weren’t listening at all, and you’ll never reach them.

Let’s flip this around. Let’s look at where we need to be disciplined, and ask if there are gaps in the tool support for software engineers. Some people want us to always write a failing test and make it pass before adding any code (or want us to write a passing test and revert our changes if it accidentally fails): does that mean our tools should not let us write code for which there’s no test? Does the same apply for acceptance tests? Some want us to refactor mercilessly; does that mean our design tools should always propose more parsimonious alternatives for passing the same tests? Some say we should get into the discipline of writing code that always reveals its intent: should the tools make a crack at interpreting the intention of the code-as-prose?

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/3jeG1KH