Scala World
5 HN recommenders · recommended in 11 months, 2016–2025
51:40 · 44K views · Jan 4, 2016
Runar Bjarnason's Scala World talk argues that restraint and precision in components beat power and flexibility. Constraints on parts make them easier to compose into systems.
HN recommends it as a talk that changes how you think about system design, and links it whenever constraints, abstraction or least power come up.
12 comments from Hacker News
I find Runar Bjarnason's talks to be interesting; one of my favourites is 'Constraints Liberate, Liberties Constrain': this video The essence of it is that constraints actually allow for easier composition and more modularity. It had a real impact on the way I think about the design of systems.
This reminds me of a great talk, Constraints Liberate, Liberties Constrain , by Runar Bjarnason. [0] Useful abstractions necessarily impose restrictions compared to a free-form 'all powerful' approach, but abstractions make it easier to perform/compose meaningful operations. A compiler can reason about an AST far more easily than it can reason about a machine-code sequence, for instance. A compiler typically converts from AST to machine-code pretty late in the game, as you want to take advantage of the utility of the abstraction, not the unlimited power of directly working with instructions. [0] this video
That's a great quote. This topic turned up a couple of weeks ago in another thread. [0] The excellent talk Constraints Liberate, Liberties Constrain , by Runar Bjarnason, gets at the same point, and even uses this same Dijkstra quote. [1] [0] [LINK] [1] this video (this takes you right to the Dijkstra quote)
This reminds me of the excellent talk "Constraints Liberate, Liberties Constrain" this video that is more about doing the programming rather than planning it as in the article, but with a similar approach.
Constraints on the user free the platform. Freedoms for the user constrain the platform. If you are interested in someone pontificating about this at length, see this video