Dorian Taylor

I really like the virtue/vice discussion framing this. You don't see virtue-oriented discussion of topics very often unless it's the accusation of "virtue signalling" being flung around.

> I keep seeing Single-Page-Apps with huge JS files that only, in terms of concrete User Experience (UX) benefits, deliver client-side validation of forms plus analytics. Apps rarely leverage the potential of a Single-Page-App. It’s still just the same ‘click, wait for load’ navigation cycle. Same as the one you get with Multi-Page-Apps. Except buggier and with a much slower initial loading time.

Very true - and also of mobile apps that behave in this way, either because they're using the same SPA technology or are just misconceived.

However:

> The Multi-Page-App forces the team to narrow the scope to a level they can handle. It puts a hard limit on their technological aspirations.

I don't see how this follows at all?

The link to https://doriantaylor.com/agile-as-trauma is fantastic too, as is the whole "I am Vanity" section. But yes, I also agree with the people here asking what this has to do with SPA vs MPA, because I don't understand the scope argument.

(Frankly I could write a paragraph response to each section as if it were a separate blog post, that's how much good content there is here)

This intrigued me:

> Don’t even get me started about URL parameters. No, not querystrings – there was originally a specification where you could do something like “/key1:value1/key2:value2/” to pass data into a request.

I couldn't find a specification, but I did find [1] which led to [2], both of which indicate that there's an idea of parameters within the URL hierarchy itself. It seems to me that it could be useful for API versioning at least.

As to the article itself, I completely agree. The problem is, though, that there's just not enough incentive for folks to actually use the Web standards suite the way (I want to believe) it was meant to be used. How much would cost to make a fully-semantic, JavaScript-extended (but not -requiring), machine-usable website which is also adaptive and beautiful and appealing to humans? And how much benefit would one realise?

Rather than do things the Right Way, folks just hack through and do it A Way, and get on with life. I wish that it weren't so, I truly do, but it is. At this point, railing against it feels like railing against the tides.

[1] http://doriantaylor.com/policy/http-url-path-parameter-syntax

[2] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986#section-3.3

I really like Dorian Taylor's analogy of software to movie production: https://doriantaylor.com/softwares-ailing-mythology
Their point is that software is a refinement of a process to the point where it can be executed by a computer (in a generally bug-free manner). Just like a movie spends a lot of time in pre-production and writing the script, we must spend a lot of time on refining our own understanding of our processes, before trying to explain them to computer via code. The faster one jumps to code, the more likely one is to have to go back and fix things, delaying the delivery of software.

So software is more similar to writing novels or movies, than construction, where a lot of time is spent just thinking through things, and going through the ups and downs of "writer's block". Perhaps one way out is to loosen the delineation between making software and using software (a la spreadsheets, Smalltalk) and moving towards more programmable environments, so one doesn't deliver software, but rather allow users to build their own as part of refining their processes.

To me, Christopher Alexander's work comes closest to describing "systems science". I recommend Notes on the Synthesis of Form, The Timeless Way of Building, and then skipping to the Nature of Order series.

I'm of the opinion right now that what we call "design" and "architecture" is really just the science of finding stable habitable zones in high-dimensional problem spaces.

What's cool about Alexander's work is that he makes a great case that this stuff is objective phenomena that can be studied!

I'm planning to write much more about Christopher Alexander on my own blog in the future, but meanwhile I can recommend Dorian Taylor's excellent works:

• https://the.natureof.software

• https://doriantaylor.com

I gave a talk on this subject at DDD Europe this year, so keep your eyes out for "Timeless Way of Software - Taylor Troesh" on their YouTube channel :)

• https://www.youtube.com/@ddd_eu

For footnotes/sidenotes/endnotes, I think about a few implementations:

- Dorian's expandable parentheticals (click on the gray phrases): https://doriantaylor.com/person/dorian-taylor#me

- Gwern's list of sidenote implementations: https://gwern.net/sidenote

- The ellipsis -> bottom modal pattern, found on buttondown articles like this one: https://buttondown.com/hillelwayne/archive/you-can-cheat-a-test-suite-with-a-big-enough/

These days, I try to remove tangents from my writing, publishing any good tangents as microblog content instead.

I'm also considering unhyperlinked footnotes, and letting the reader scroll to the bottom if they want, the low-tech way. It's less distracting that way, and there's no accessibility issues either.

This article is blowing my mind, as is the linked article "Agile as Trauma"[1], written by apparently a different author but with a very similar broad perspective.

I want to read more like this.

[1] https://doriantaylor.com/agile-as-trauma

[update: holy cow, this one too https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2021/software-crisis-2/

Today is turning into "read about existential problems with how software is developed" day for me]