Sunday, August 26, 2007

Holding a problem in your head

The linkied article (via Daring Fireball) describes the way that many programmers work - by loading the problem into their head - and techniques designed to manage and support working in such a way. Paul Graham makes the comparison with solving mathematics problems, which is something I can (and obviously have decided to) talk about due to the physics I studied and taught. Then I also have things to say about his specific recommendations.


In my (limited) experience, both the physicist in me and the programmer in me like to have a scratch model of the problem available to refer to. Constructing such a model in both cases acts as the aide memoire to bootstrap the prolem domain into my head, and as such should be as quick, and as nasty, as possible. Agile Design has a concept known as "just barely good enough", and it definitely applies at this stage. With this model in place I now have a structured layout in my head, which will aid the implementation, but I also have it scrawled out somewhere that I can refer to if in working on one component (writing one class, or solving one integral) I forget a detail about another.


Eventually it might be necessary to have a 'posh' layout of the domain model, but this is not yet the time. In maths as in computing, the solution to the problem actually contains the structure you came up with, so if someone wants to see just the structure (of which more in a later paragraph) it can be extracted easily. The above statement codifies why in both cases I (and most of the people I've worked with, in each field) prefer to use a whiteboard than a software tool for this bootstrap phase. It's impossible - repeat, impossible - to braindump as quickly onto a keyboard, mouse or even one of those funky tablet stylus things as it is with an instantly-erasable pen on a whiteboard. Actually, in the maths or physics realm, there's nothing really suitable anyway. Tools like Maple or Mathematica are designed to let you get the solution to a problem, and really only fit into the workflow once you've already defined the problem - there's no adequate way to have large chunks of "magic happens here, to be decided at a later date". In the software world, CASE tools cause you to spend so long thinking about use-cases, CRC definitions or whatever that you actually have to delve into nitty-gritty details while doing the design; great for software architects, bad for the problem bootstrap process. Even something like Omnigraffle can be overkill. it's very quick but I generally only switch to it if I think my boardwriting has become illegible. To give an example, I once 'designed' a tool I needed at Oxford Uni with boxes-and-clouds-and-lines on my whiteboard, then took a photo of the whiteboard which I set as the desktop image on my computer. If I got lost, then I was only one keystroke away from hiding Xcode and being able to see my scrawls. The tool in question was a WebObjects app, but I didn't even open EOModeler until after I'd taken the photo.




Incidentally, I expect that the widespread use of this technique contributes to "mythical man-month" problems in larger software projects. A single person can get to work really quickly with a mental bootstrap, but then any bad decisions made in planning the approach to the solution are unlikely to be adequately questioned during implementation. A small team is good because with even one other person present, I discuss things; even if the other person isn't giving feedback (because I'm too busy mouthing off, often) I find myself thinking "just why am I trying to justify this heap of crap?" and choosing another approach. Add a few more people, and actually the domain model does need to be well-designed (although hopefully they're then all given different tasks to work on, and those sub-problems can be mentally bootstrapped). This is where I disagree with Paul - in recommendation 6, he says that the smaller the team the better, and that a team of one is best. I think a team of one is less likely to have internal conflicts of the constructive kind, or even think past the first solution they get concensus on (which is of course the first solution any member thinks of). I believe that two is the workable minimum team size, and that larger teams should really be working as permutations (not combinations) of teams of two.


Paul's suggestion number 4 to rewrite often is almost directly from the gospel according to XP, except that in the XP world the recommendation is to identify things which can be refactored as early as possible, and then refactor them. Rewriting for the hell of it is not good from the pointy-haired perspective because it means time spent with no observable value - unless the rewrite is because the original was buggy, and the rewritten version is somehow better. It's bad for the coder because it takes focus away from solving the problem and onto trying to mentally map the entire project (or at least, all of it which depends on the rewritten code); once there's already implementation in place it's much harder to mentally bootstrap the problem, because the subconscious automatically pulls in all those things about APIs and design patterns that I was thinking about while writing the inital solution. It's also harder to separate the solution from the problem, once there already exists the solution.


The final sentence of the above paragraph leads nicely into discussion of suggestion 5, writing re-readable code. I'm a big fan of comment documentation like headerdoc or doxygen because not only does it impose readability on the code (albeit out-of-band readability), but also because if the problem-in-head approach works as well as I think, then it's going to be necessary to work backwards from the solution to the pointy-haired bits in the middle required by external observers, like the class relationship diagrams and the interface specifications. That's actually true in the maths/physics sphere too - very often in an exam I would go from the problem to the solution, then go back and show my working.

Saturday, August 25, 2007

Template change

I had to make some minor edits to the Blogger template used here anyway, so I decided to have a little monkey with the fonts. Here's what you used to get:


And here's what you now get:


I think that's much better. Good old Helvetica! I don't understand anything about typography at all, but I think that the latter doesn't look as messy, perhaps because of the spacing being tighter. Interestingly the title actually takes up more space, because the bold font is heavier. Marvellous.

Friday, August 24, 2007

Random collection of amazing stuff

The most cool thing that I noticed today ever is that Google Maps now allows you to add custom waypoints by dragging-and-dropping the route line onto a given road. This is great! I'm going to a charity biker raffle thing in Pensford next weekend, and Google's usual recommendation is that I stay on the M4 to Bristol, and drive through Bristol towards Shepton Mallet. This is, frankly, ludicrous. It's much more sensible to go through Bath and attack the A37 from the South, and now I can let Google know that.


Trusted JDS is über-cool. Not so much the actual functionality, which is somewhere between being pointy-haired enterprisey nonsense and NSA-derived "we require this feature, we can't tell you why, or what it is, or how it should work, but implement it because I'm authorised to shoot you and move in with your wife" fun. But implementing Mandatory Access Control in a GUI, and having it work, and make sense, is one hell of an achievement. Seven hells, in the case of Trusted Openlook, of which none are achievement. My favourite part of TJDS is that the access controls are checked by pasteboard actions, so trying to paste Top Secret text into an Unrestricted e-mail becomes a no-no.


There does exist Mac MAC (sorry, I've also written "do DO" this week) support, in the form of SEDarwin, but (as with SELinux) most of the time spent in designing policies for SEDarwin actually boils down to opening up enough permissions to stop from breaking stuff - and that stuff mainly breaks because the applications (or even the libraries on which those applications are based) don't expect to not be allowed to, for instance, talk to the pasteboard server. In fact, I'm going to save this post as a draft, then kill pbs and see what happens.


Hmmm... that isn't what I expected. I can actually still copy and paste text (probably uses a different pasteboard mechanism). pbs is a zombie, though. Killed an app by trying to copy an image out of it, too, and both of these symptoms would seem to fit with my assumption above; Cocoa just doesn't know what to do if the pasteboard server isn't available. If you started restricting access to it (and probably the DO name servers and distributed notification centres too) then you'd be in a right mess.

Saturday, August 18, 2007

It's update o'clock

In other words, it's "Graham remembers that someone needs to write the interwebs, too" time. The main reason I haven't written in a while is that I'm enjoying the new job, so it's satiating my hacking desires. No hacking projects = nothing to talk about. I can't really talk about the work stuff, either; this is unfortunate because I did some really cool KVC-cheating in a prototype app I wrote, and it'd be a good article to describe that.


I've more or less dropped off the GNUstep radar recently. I still need to talk to the employers' legal eagles in order to update my FSF copyright assignment, and then find something to hack on. Currently I only have a Mac OS X machine so I'd probably switch to some app-level stuff. I have half a plan in my mind for a SOPE app, but despite reading all the documentation I still haven't worked out how to get started :-|. The code isn't too much of a problem, I've used WebObejcts before, but WebObjects has a 'hit this button to build and run your WebObjects code' button, and there's no description AFAICT for SOPE of what to put in the GNUmakefile to get built and running SOPE code, even whether you're supposed to provide your own main() or anything. Hmmm...I wonder if there's a sample project around...