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The Programmer's Paradox

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Oversimplication
For a long time, the software industry turned against sophisticated power techniques like abstraction.

Partly because getting a little abstract is difficult for some people, but also because it slows down the number of lines they can grind. As an added bonus, it is a bit harder to debug.

People felt that rapidly churning out super simple, near-trivial, bru...

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Ordering
With complex work, the order in which you do it hugely affects the quality, speed, and accuracy.

If there are ten subtasks, you do not really have the option to do them in any order. You need to start with some tasks first, before you do the others. They are dependent.

That’s pretty obvious if you are building a house. You can’t just do the roof first if yo...

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Yak Shaving
The loose definition of yak shaving is that, on your way to completing the main thing, you recurse down so far, removing other little blockers, that ultimately you end up shaving a yak.

We see that in programming all of the time. You start adding a button to a screen, but you have to rearrange the other widgets. The backend stuff isn’t quite right; you have to fix som...

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Setbacks
In the mid-eighties, I was very excited about the potential of computers. Little personal computers were disrupting those massive, expensive beasts lurking in basements. It seemed like computers could integrate into our daily lives, change the world, and make it better.

Computer Science and Informatics were having a heyday; innovation was overflowing. There seemed to ...

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Flow Design
One of the pitfalls of software design is for people to only concentrate on the narrow case where everything works as desired, but ignore all of the other cases where it has gone partially or totally wrong.

Data flow analysis can help avoid this.

The idea is that given some complex scenario for software mechanics, we can fully iterate all of the issues in ...

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