[HN Gopher] Big Ball of Mud (1999)
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Big Ball of Mud (1999)
Author : softwaredoug
Score : 104 points
Date : 2023-04-07 13:22 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.laputan.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.laputan.org)
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| This is a great article, but it has some considerable history, on
| HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=laputan.org
| dang wrote:
| Reposts are fine after a year or so!
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
|
| These seem to be the threads with comments:
|
| _Big Ball of Mud (1999)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28915865 - Oct 2021 (23
| comments)
|
| _Big Ball of Mud (1999)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22365496 - Feb 2020 (48
| comments)
|
| _Big Ball of Mud_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21650011 - Nov 2019 (1
| comment)
|
| _Big Ball of Mud (1999)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21484045 - Nov 2019 (1
| comment)
|
| _Big Ball of Mud (1999)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13716667 - Feb 2017 (6
| comments)
|
| _Big Ball of Mud (1999)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9989424 - Aug 2015 (9
| comments)
|
| _Big Ball of Mud_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6745991 - Nov 2013 (21
| comments)
|
| _Big Ball of Mud_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=911445 - Oct 2009 (2
| comments)
|
| _The "Big Ball of Mud" Pattern_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10259 - April 2007 (2
| comments)
| delano wrote:
| Thanks for taking the time to do this.
| vrglvrglvrgl wrote:
| [dead]
| Caitlynmeeks wrote:
| aka main.cpp
| dunk010 wrote:
| One of the best articles about software engineering ever written.
| They should pin it to the top of the HN front page :P
| foobiekr wrote:
| Agreed. Reading this in 1999 actually explained everything I'd
| seen and everything I would see. I've read a lot of papers but
| this is the one I see in real life every week for 22 years.
| dmoy wrote:
| Every time this is posted I forget and think it's going to be
| about the art form that is, roughly, a big ball of mud that's
| polished ridiculously smooth.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorodango
| fossuser wrote:
| I liked this urbit related blog post that starts with the 'big
| ball of mud' and thinks about how to avoid this if you were to
| boil the ocean and redesign everything:
| https://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-progr...
| anotheraccount9 wrote:
| EWD 215: A Case against the GO TO Statement (Go-to statement
| considered harmful):
| https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd02xx/EWD215.PDF
| api wrote:
| Seems like a lot of "cloud native" software is this, and nobody
| suffers but the people who have to work on it or pay the massive
| cloud bill.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| This describes the app I've been developing for the last couple
| of years.
|
| I've been working with a nontechnical team, who didn't really
| know what they wanted, and it "accreted," over a period of
| about 20 months.
|
| After we had basically decided that we had finalized the
| features (they _finally_ knew what they wanted), I tossed out
| the entire old codebase, refactored the business logic into a
| framework-independent package module, and have been rewriting
| the UI, with a designer, on top of that.
|
| Every now and then, I can use some snippets from the old
| codebase, but the majority of the code is new.
|
| It adds about three months to the schedule, but it is totally
| worth it.
| dopidopHN wrote:
| Is the old system still running or do you only keep the
| codebase around for reference?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| It's not a running system. It's an iOS app.
|
| The backend (servers) are running (they haven't changed
| much), but I keep the old codebase around for snippets.
| bitwize wrote:
| Well, "the only thing that matters in software is the
| experience of the user", so don't expect much change as long as
| the UI looks fresh and the users are happy.
| foobiekr wrote:
| The authors could not have even imagined the crazy new
| innovations in mud balls that microservices would create. And
| much harder to address.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Microservices are the act of getting the your ball empty of
| mud by taking small pieces, squeezing them as hard as you
| can, and throwing the results all back at the large ball.
| rco8786 wrote:
| All software eventually becomes this, "cloud native" or
| otherwise. It is the "everything evolves into crabs" of
| software.
| windowshopping wrote:
| I find the all caps links scattered throughout this article
| extremely annoying for some reason. Just distracting. Feels very
| 90s. I'm glad we're 24 years past this style of content.
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