Software reuse is more like an organ transplant than snapping Lego blocks (2011)

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/02/03/lego-blocks-and-organ-transplants/

by nilsandrey • 6 years ago

667 228 6 years ago

fbonetti• 6 years ago

That's hilariously accurate.

It really depends on the complexity of the software doesn't it? Libraries and packages often snap into my projects easily and without much modification at all, especially if I'm planning on using them. I can see this analogy working for more complex projects though, where you may be copy pasting code from on project to another and trying to make it fit together.

julianlam• 6 years ago

With significant enough abstraction and a sensible public API you can make this claim, but more often than not you end up needing to dive into the internals to hook things up properly.

DivisionSol• 6 years ago

When I’m working with Unix utilities like grep or doing stuff with xargs... it genuinely feels like I’m playing with legos.

I feel like this is trying to argue for more “consulting surgeons” when we need more “tooling machinists” who know how to make a good LEGO block.

vorpalhex• 6 years ago

I think the author is discussing large existing apps, for instance connecting something like an externally built authentication layer to an existing user management suite. It's not just plug and play but a series of careful surgical moves.

Obviously shuffling data around is a different (easier) beast, especially for one off tasks.

catalogia• 6 years ago

xargs/etc are like arcane legos, where there's more than one brick vendor in the mix with different vendor's versions of the brick supporting different features, or the same feature but implemented in different ways. And even if you're only dealing with one brick vendor, there's still little uniformity in the interfaces of different bricks. GNU vs BSD xargs, -0 vs -print0, etc.

True lego have the property that if two parts snap together, it's a valid configuration. That's definitely not the case for unix utilities. You have to read a manual for each sort of brick.

buzzkillington• 6 years ago

I love unix for what it was. But it made a lot of concessions for 70s hardware that we're stuck with.

It is rather unfortunate for us that everything that's come afterwards has been in some way even worse.

runningmike• 6 years ago

Reuse of my own sloppy code is always easy. But reuse of complex code created by others is often far more difficult since context is missing. Creating god reusable software code block, are often the lower level apis The more context specific software is, the harder reuse gets. It’s the pain of generic vs context specific imho.

mynegation• 6 years ago

This is an astute metaphor. In my experience software reuse simplicity strongly depends on the following factors:

* interface surface area (i.e. how much of an interface is exposed)

* data types of data coming in and out (static or dynamic). Static languages have an advantage here as many integration constraints can be expressed with types.

* whether it is a very focused functionality (e.g. extracting EXIF from file) vs cross-cutting concerns (e.g. logging)

The more limited surface area, the simpler the data types and invariants, the more localized it is - the more it is like LEGO as opposed to an organ transplant

agentultra4• 6 years ago

Haskell is much closer to the lego blocks analogy than most languages I've tried due to the focus on composition and polymorphism.

The teetering edge that grinds some people's gears are monads which don't compose generally but do compose in specific, concrete ways a-la monad transformers. The next breakthrough here, I think, is going to be the work coming out of effect systems based on free(r) monads and delimited continuations. Once the dust settles here I think we'll have a good language for composing side effects as well.

In the current state of things I think heart-surgery is an apt metaphor. The lego brick analogy works for small, delimited domains with denotational semantics. "Workflow" languages and such.

chrischen5• 6 years ago

That’s the whole point of functional programming: composition of small things to make bigger things.

munk-a2• 6 years ago

Functional programming does it better - but it still suffers from the issue that when developing a programming solution we developers need to account for all edge cases (if we're doing it right) which requires a lot of decisions to be made. The important decisions for the use of the module will be carefully made - the less important decisions will be arbitrarily made. Almost no uses of the module will encompass a need for every edge case to be decided in a specific direction but when that module is reused the new consumer will probably have a slightly different requirement about which decisions go which ways - this, I think, is the central pain point of software reuse.

Completely agnostic problems do exist and modules to solve those can be very strong - but that is a small subset of all the problems we want modules for.

gmfawcett4• 6 years ago

To be fair, that was also the major point of OO, and of structured programming before that.

dustingetz• 6 years ago

You don't need haskell to make applications compose

See JVM (garbage collection), React, Datomic

Functions and scalar values is probably enough

jkachmar2• 6 years ago

I like Haskell, I write Haskell at my day job (and did so at my previous day job), and I help maintain some of the community build infrastructure so I’m familiar with a large-ish graph of the Haskell ecosystem and how things fit together.[0]

I don’t really think Haskell is _meaningfully_ superior than other languages at the things that OP is talking about.

Refactoring Haskell _in the small_[1] is much nicer than many other languages, I don’t disagree on that point. Despite this, Haskell applications are _just as susceptible_ to the failures of software architecture that bind components of software together as other languages are.

In some cases I would even suggest that combining two Haskell applications can be _more_ fraught than in other languages, as the language community doesn’t have much in the way of agreed-upon design patterns that provide common idioms that can be used to enmesh them cleanly.

[0] I’m mostly belaboring these points to establish that I’m not talking out of my ass, and that I’ve at least got some practical experience to back up my points.

[1] This is to say when one refractors individual functions collections of interlocking abstraction

panopticon• 6 years ago

I think what OP was hitting on is that functional programming likes to put function composition front-and-center.

Glomming together functions that operate on very abstract data structures feels a lot more like Legos than wiring traditional imperative/OO code.

fabianhjr• 6 years ago

WAI is a great example on the sort of compat/interop interfaces that are more common and easier to rollout in Haskell than in non-(typed functional) languages.

https://github.com/yesodweb/wai

whateveracct• 6 years ago

Despite this, Haskell applications are _just as susceptible_ to the failures of software architecture that bind components of software together as other languages are.

I think it's more complicated than this. Yes, you can push poorly-architected Haskell to production & be in a rough spot. However, my experience says that even the gnarliest Haskell is easier to improve than any other language.

Because of the types, purity, etc, I find that it's much easier to zoom around a codebase without tracing every point in between. I can typically make one small change to "crack things open" [1], follow GHC's guidance, and then go from there. I've been able to take multiple large Haskell projects that other engineers deemed unfixable (to the point where there were talks of rewrites) & just fix them mechanically and have them live & improve continuously for years to come.

The big thing with Haskell IME is you don't really need to have design patterns that everyone follows. I don't freak out when I see multiple different idioms used in the same codebase because idgaf about folk programming aesthetic. If an idiom is used, I follow it. It's all mechanical. I barely use my brain when coding professionally in Haskell. I save it all for the higher-level work. Wish I could say that about professionally programming in other languages of equal experience :/

So while it's just as susceptible (because good vs bad software architecture is more a function of time & effort) it's also typically pretty braindead to fix.

[1] A favorite technique is to add a new case to a key datatype and have its body be Void. Then I just follow the pattern match errors & sprinkle in `absurd`. I now have a fork in the road that is actually a knowably a no-op at runtime.

jfoutz• 6 years ago

You've got far more Haskell experience than I do, but I have done some pretty heavy refactoring on large java codebases. The process always seemed to be, tease out some interfaces and switch the implementation of those interfaces. Over and over and over. I could lean on javac and tests but some knots are hard to untangle and take a long time.

I believe you that the in the large it's still hard. It seems so much more pleasant day to day untangling that big ball of string with Haskell rather than Java.

ChrisMarshallNY3• 6 years ago

How about modding cars?

It's neither as bad as an organ transplant, nor as easy as LEGO.

It is also highly variable, dependent upon the SDKs and API choices.

I've written SDKs for decades. Some are super simple, where you just add the dylib or source file, and call a function, and other ones require establishing a context, instantiating one (or more) instances, and setting all kinds of properties.

I think it's amusing, and accurate, in many cases; but, like most things in life, it's not actually that simple.

seph-reed2• 6 years ago

In a word: "Engineering"

skwb• 6 years ago

If only there was a specific job title for people whose primary job was to "engineer" software.

jackhalford• 6 years ago

For reusing software source I agree. The only current way around this is with the unix pipe system where you reuse software _executables_ instead of software _source code_

The reason it works is because unix softwares agree to a simple contract of reading from stdin and writing to stdout, which is very limiting in terms of concurrency but unlocks a huge world of compatibility.

I wonder if we will ever get software legos without the runtime bloat from forking.

ps: to anyone countering with examples of languages that are reusable through modules, that doesn't count because you are locked in to a given language.

criddell• 6 years ago

Another current way is with COM in Windows.

meatmanek• 6 years ago

I wonder if we will ever get software legos without the runtime bloat from forking.

In a sense, shared object files / dynamically linked libraries meet this criteria -- they can be loaded into program memory and used by a single process.

There's also flowgraph-based signal processing systems, like gnuradio, which heavily use the concept of pipes (usually a stream of numbers or a stream of vectors of numbers) but, as I understand it, don't require OS forking. (Though they do implement their own schedulers for concurrency, and for gnuradio at least, blocks are typically shipped as source so I'm not sure whether that counts as reusing executables vs. reusing source code.)

kstenerud• 6 years ago

Software re-use is limited by the primitive structures and algorithms in the language and runtime library. The more fundamental parts (queues, strings for example) that are left to the user to implement, the less likely it is that it will be possible to make compatible components.

petermcneeley• 6 years ago

Well designed modular software is certainly like Lego. It just takes investment. It is a choice to have organ transplant software be the default. That choice is non investment.

solidist• 6 years ago

Fred Brooks had a similar take, in an opinionated way, with the concept of "lead surgeon". Motivation to re-read the chapter in mythical man-month.

dmlorenzetti• 6 years ago

One thing I appreciate about John D. Cook's blog is that he doesn't feel the need to pad out what he wants to say.

Here, he had a thought, and he expressed it in two paragraphs. I'm sure he could have riffed on the core idea for another 10 paragraphs, developed a few tangential lines of thought, inserted pull quotes -- in short, turned it into a full-blown essay.

Given that his blog serves, at least in part, as an advertisement for his services, he even has some incentive to demonstrate how comprehensive and "smart" he can be.

His unpadded style means I'm never afraid to check out a link to one of his posts on HN. Whereas I will often forego clicking on links to Medium, or the Atlantic, or wherever, until I have looked at a few comments to see whether it will be worth my time.

partyboat1586• 6 years ago

"I enjoy that John D. Cook doesn't pad his posts."

Accujack• 6 years ago

He's a concise blogger.

gmfawcett4• 6 years ago

Please edit all of my writing. ;-)

eben-ezer• 6 years ago

This is the first time I've seen one his posts. It caught me really off guard but I completely agree with your sentiments. It is refreshing to see and I wish more blogs took this method to heart

jihadjihad• 6 years ago

Honestly I was on the fence about clicking the link until I saw where it was from--his content is reliably interesting and straight to the point. If it was on Medium I wouldn't have even bothered and, like you, would have gone to the comments. The compression is lossy but it's a great filter for crap content.

gmfawcett4• 6 years ago

A few links would have been nice -- e.g. to any serious comparison of LEGO to software components.

mduncs• 6 years ago

Its an interesting statement, but how much discussion can we get from it as an audience?

I haven't thought about this very much, and there is a lot I'm curious about that he hasn't elaborated on.

What are the signs of rejection? Whats an example of failure, are there examples of that wonderful modular behavior that he admires?

Its a nice way to introduce a thought or observation, but I want to know more about why he thinks that, not what he thinks.

qchris• 6 years ago

There was a science teacher in my high school that used to have a rule about doing things similarly. For any kind of a lab report, instead of "you must write a report of at least 3 pages", it was "your report must not be more than 2 pages long."

Not only am I sure it made it easier for him to grade, but it really forced students to write concisely about their work.

groby_b• 6 years ago

For what it's worth, as an advertisement for his services, conciseness is better. It's easier to disagree with parts of a detailed opinion than with a vague general statement.

You can then project your own opinions into the general framework, and you find you fully agree :)

As a consultant, "I 100% agree with you, you understand me" is exactly the feeling you want.

He writes the long articles that show off his smarts in fairly specialized areas, where you need to be an expert to disagree.

It's really clever, and I'm curious if it's intentional on his part, or just his style.

kyawzazaw2• 6 years ago

why lot words when few ok

rbosinger• 6 years ago

I feel like if even on a purely technical level we eventually achieve Lego like reuse that the business and social layer of things will ensure that somebody always requires an off brand Lego block to be shoved in there. It's almost human nature.

milansuk2• 6 years ago

This is exactly what I'm working on right now. My approach is a little bit different. It's about building a community, where people share LEGO pieces(I call them Assets), but they also share where and how in the code they've made the connections. After some time there will be enough connections so users will just re-use them. Only time will show how well it will work.

I wrote about it few weeks ago: https://skyalt.com/blog/dsl.html

I have a plan on how to do that on paper, but because connecting assets together can be complex, it's better If most of the users don't do that. The key thing is that users don't share only assets, but also how and where they are connected to each other. It's like when someone makes and publishes a library, but also example code for how to work with a library. But in SkyAlt, asset connections will be automated. This is also why it's very important to build and grow the community - more assets, more connections, which means easier to use.

hellodanylo• 6 years ago

Do users have incentive to document and share the connections, other than helping the community's long term goal?

Absence of such incentive appears to be the reason that open-source software is not always perfectly connectable -- few people have a significant incentive to ensure this design goal.

milansuk2• 6 years ago

I'll launch it in a few weeks, so right now I don't know.

I believe that in the future the most of software will be open-source and If people don't have a problem sharing blocks/widgets/assets, they will not have a problem to share information about connections.

Side note: Every program has 2 parts - instructions and data. When people share assets and connections, both are instructions, so their data stay private.

daenz• 6 years ago

The reason for this is that LEGO has a tightly regulated interface that each piece must adhere to. This interface regulation doesn't exist in software to that degree, nor is it necessarily desirable.

nradov• 6 years ago

And yet back in 1993, Visual Basic programmers were able to reuse software by literally snapping together controls like Lego blocks. There was a rich ecosystem of third-party controls. Competing tools such as Delphi had similar features. Since then the industry has gone backwards, or at best sideways, in many areas.

old-gregg2• 6 years ago

I wanted to make a similar point with piping UNIX commands. I can think of two reasons why the degradation happened:

1. Expansion of the software universe. Back in VB6 times, there were fewer programmers but many languages. Reusing components made with different languages was a big deal (VB used COM/ActiveX machinery to make this possible), but today there are so many more developers, that each language/ecosystem is big enough to exist on an island and happily not interact with anything unless it's a grpc/rest endpoint.

2. Transition to SaaS. We no longer use the same platform for building and running. Your VB app used to run on more or less the same computer it was built on. SaaS applications run in weird, custom-made, hard to reproduce and fragile computers called "environments". They are composed from all kinds of complex bits and this makes SaaS applications less portable. Frankly, they feel more like "environment configuration" than "code" sometimes.

pjc50• 6 years ago

The SaaS expansion could make componentisation easier - it would just be microservices, but from different companies. Somehow it doesn't. Possibly because it's not in their interest to do so.

On the other hand .. look at how much software goes into e.g. car entertainment systems. How many systems have "curl" in, for example. Have a look at the vast list of BSD license acknowledgements in many systems.

Look at the npm ecosystem, where people complain that there's too much componentisation.

jacobr1• 6 years ago

This is why containers are a _big deal_. They are bundling the "environment" with the "code"

We don't fully get back to component reuse, but it makes the sharing of services much more feasible, and more portable as well.

trixie_2• 6 years ago

Wasn't web components supposed to be the holy grail to bring us back to vb6 like composable front end applications? What happened?

barbecue_sauce• 6 years ago

People liked React better.

qes• 6 years ago

There was a rich ecosystem of third-party controls.

So does HTML/CSS/JS, and they'll also often be adapted to the various popular front end frameworks of the day - Angular, React, Vue currently.

I also find it easier to customize and compose 3rd party UI components on the web than I did back in the 90's with VB, Delphi, MFC, COM, etc.

joe_the_user• 6 years ago

Imagine two large structures made of legos, say a man-figure and a car-figure. How easy would it be to snap those together, to make a "man in a race car" figure? A moments thought would show it would be quite hard. Neither is likely to have merely a flat surface.

So basically, increased complexity of components, any components, makes them harder to combine - except in very carefully controlled circumstances.

jcelerier• 6 years ago

And in 2020 I can use Qt and Boost and FFMPEG and ... which are a gigantic C & C++ libraries of things that I can reuse too. That's what reuse is.

bradleybuda• 6 years ago

When I hear "snapping software like Lego bricks" my mind immediately goes to the Spring Framework, which must be one of the largest, most-used, and most complete (modern) attempts at this paradigm. I haven't used it for anything large, but I would say it does not deliver on that promise.

I'm curious to hear from those who have worked on large, sophisticated, Spring Framework apps - does it really feel like snapping pieces together?

TheAceOfHearts• 6 years ago

No, but Rails definitely did feel like snapping pieces together. RailsCasts was a blessing.

majkinetor• 6 years ago

This is not that accurate if we talk about libraries. Those mostly have well defined scope, well defined interface, and are designed to be integrated so most definitelly feel like LEGO.

However, this is totally accurate when reusing the code from your previous project on your next one. I developed many large gov services, and each one reused bunch of stuff from previous ones like user management, complete areas of functionality etc. Here, the analogy is adequate, artefacts from previous projects creeep in constantly. This feels more like single project evolving (or devolving) over long period of time (years to decade).

rsync• 6 years ago

"People have been comparing software components to LEGO blocks for a couple decades. We should be able to assemble applications by snapping together modular components, just like LEGOs. There has been progress, but for the most part we haven’t realized the promise LEGO-style software development."

  pg_dump -U postgres db | ssh user@rsync.net "dd of=db_dump"

... looks like Legos to me ...

whiw• 6 years ago

Having not used any of the following I may be wrong here, but don't dataflow languages (eg Labview?) come close to this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dataflow_programming

And isn't GNU Radio effectively a domain-specific language for plugging signal processing elements together?

_bxg15• 6 years ago

This makes me realize: the one example I can think of where software has been "Lego-like" is Unix piping. I'm not a Unix purist or anything, but they really hit on something special when it came to "code talking to other code".

Speculating about what made it stand apart: it seems like the (enforced) simplicity of the interfaces between pieces of code. Just text streams; one in, one out, nothing more nothing less. No coming up with a host of parallel, named streams that all have their own behaviors that need to be documented. And good luck coming up with a complicated data protocol built atop your text stream; it won't work with anything else and so nobody will use your program.

Interface complexity was harshly discouraged just by the facts-on-the-ground of the ecosystem.

Compare that with the average library interface, or framework, or domain-specific language, or REST API, etc. etc. and it becomes obvious why integrating any of those things is more like performing surgery.

nwienert2• 6 years ago

In practice it’s totally inscrutable. I never remember or even feel comfortable guessing at anything more than the most basic. Meanwhile, any typed library in language X usually works immediately with no docs given a decent IDE.

_bxg15• 6 years ago

I would argue that it thrives in those most basic cases, and isn't really suited to building truly complex systems. But I also don't think there's anything wrong with that. There's a use-case for simple pieces that are easy to snap together, and I think that use-case has been greatly under-served because lots of things that aim for it end up as complicated, multi-faceted APIs.

You could almost say that micro-services are trying to follow in the Unix tradition. But the problem is that a) they don't really get used in that ideal, small-scale use-case because they're almost always written and consumed internally, not exposed to the public, and b) they do get used in those huge, complex cases where their lego-ness stops being a virtue and starts being a liability.

jvanderbot• 6 years ago

In your practice you have favored an alternative. (not "in practice", implying absolute)

In my practice I have used both with great success. For logging, parsing, and displaying playback data from field systems, UNIX and UNIX-like tools have been incredible. VNLog in particular is a wonderful way to interact with data if you need just a bit of structure on top of unix outputs.

And anyway, getting from not-so-great data to something that a typed library in language X can parse is a great job for plain old Unix tools.

amiga_500• 6 years ago

In practice it's been massively successful for decades.

ohazi• 6 years ago

I think the best way to describe pipes to the uninitiated is in terms of copy & paste.

Copy & paste is the basic, ubiquitous, doesn't-try-to-do-too-much IPC mechanism that allows normal users to shovel data from one program into another. As simple as it is, it's indispensable, and it's difficult to imagine trying to use a computer without this feature.

The same applies to pipes, even though they work a little bit differently and are useful in slightly different situations. They're the "I just need to do this one thing" IPC mechanism for slightly more technical users.

boring_twenties2• 6 years ago

difficult to imagine trying to use a computer without [copy & paste]

Remember the first iPhone? I wasn't into it, but a bunch of my (senior developer) colleagues were. I asked them how they lived without copy & paste and they all told me it was just no big deal.

epr2• 6 years ago

Rich Hickey addresses this in his famous 2011 talk, titled Simple Made Easy.

Are we all not glad we don’t use the Unix method of communicating on the web? Right? Any arbitrary command string can be the argument list for your program, and any arbitrary set of characters can come out the other end. Let’s all write parsers.

The way that I think about this is that the Unix philosophy, which this behavior is undoubtedly representative of, is at one end of a spectrum, with something like strict typing at the other end. Rich, being a big proponent of what is described in the article as "Lego-like" development clearly does not prefer either end of the spectrum, but something in-between. In my opinion as well, the future of software development is somewhere in the middle of this spectrum, although exactly where the line should be drawn is a matter of trade-offs, not absolute best and worst. My estimation is that seasoned developers who have worked in many languages and in a variety of circumstances have all internalized this.

_bxg15• 6 years ago

Let’s all write parsers

And yet, at least for the Unix tools I've used, nobody did write an elaborate parser. Instead, they all ended up using newlines to represent a sequence. There were never really nested structures at all. That least-common-denominator format they were forced into ended up making input and output really easy to quickly understand.

Maybe the problem with Rest APIs is that JSON does too good of a job at making it easy to represent complex structures? Maybe we'd be better off using CSV as our data format for everything.

_jal• 6 years ago

There is also an audience mismatch. Most of the criticism of pipelines is from professional programmers.

A lot of the value of scripting, pipes and associated concepts is low barrier to entry.

I agree with the value of strong typing. But I also remember how infuriating it was to learn to work with a type system when I was learning to write code.

When I need a quick answer of some sort, iteratively piping crap at a series of "| grep | awk" is exactly what the doctor ordered. Sure, I could bullet proof it nicely and make it reusable by investing time the time to write it in something saner, but there's zero reason to - I'm not likely to ever want to perform the same action again.

jb36893• 6 years ago

In my opinion as well, the future of software development is somewhere in the middle of this spectrum

Unfortunately this is complexity in and of itself. I don't disagree that different cases require different tools, however the split should be strongly weighted in one direction. Mostly IPC over pipes with a few exceptions, mostly REST and JSON with a few exceptions, mostly language X with a few exceptions. Everyone will have their own preferences, but I think it's important to pick a side (or at least mostly pick a side) or else you accept chaos

dragonwriter• 6 years ago

Are we all not glad we don’t use the Unix method of communicating on the web? Right? Any arbitrary command string can be the argument list for your program, and any arbitrary set of characters can come out the other end. Let’s all write parsers.

Um, but that's exactly what we do use on the web. Oh, sure, there's some really popular formats for input and output with widely available parsers (HTML, XML, JSON), and HTTP itself (as well as other protocols) specifies headers and other formats that need to be parsed before you get to those body formats, including telling you what those headers tell you about the other formats so you can no which parsers you need to write, or use if you can find one written for you.

Izkata2• 6 years ago

Are we all not glad we don’t use the Unix method of communicating on the web?

Uzbl is a collection of "web interface tools" that adhere to the Unix philosophy, that come together to create a browser.

https://www.uzbl.org/

taneq2• 6 years ago

Are we all not glad we don’t use the Unix method of communicating on the web? Right? Any arbitrary command string can be the argument list for your program, and any arbitrary set of characters can come out the other end.

He clearly uses a different web to the one I use. >.>

shadowgovt6• 6 years ago

I think piping works well because it's an opinionated framework for IPC. The strong opinions it holds are:

1) data is a stream of bytes

2) data is only a stream of bytes

That's it. And it turns out that's a pretty powerful abstraction... Except it requires the developer to write a lot of code to massage the data entering and/or leaving the pipe if either end of it thinks "stream of bytes" means something different. In the broad-and-flat space where it's most useful---text manipulation---it works great because every tool agrees what text is (kind of... Pipe some Unicode into something that only understands only ASCII and you're going to have a lousy day). When we get outside that space?

So while, on the one hand, it allows a series of processes to go from a text file to your audio hardware (neat!), on the other hand, it allows you to accidentally pipe /dev/random directly into your audio hardware, which, here's hoping you don't have your headphones turned all the way up.

This example also kind of handwaves something, in that you touched on it directly but called it a feature, not a bug: pipes are almost always the wrong tool if you do want structure. They're too flexible. It's way the wrong API for anything where you cannot afford to have any mistakes, because unless you include something in the pipe chain to sanity-check your data, who knows what comes out the other end?

XMPPwocky• 6 years ago

A bit of a tangent, but... audio hardware can't really be treated as a stream of bytes either.

You used to be able to cat things to /dev/dsp, but- that used something like 8khz, 8-bit, mono audio. That's horrendous. Because, with just a stream of bytes, you have to settle for the least common denominator- /dev/dsp had IOCTLs to set sample rate, number of channels, and bit depth, but... with just a stream of bytes, you can't do that.

Similarly, video data via /dev/fb0 - AFAIK you don't even have defaults there to rely on, to display anything useful you need to do IOCTLs to find out about its format.

When do you not want structure? Seriously-

Plain, human-readable ASCII text is maybe a candidate - but even then there's implicit structure (things like handling CR/LF, tabs...)

Unicode text? You know that's structure. (Ever had a read() call return in the middle of a UTF-8 multi-byte sequence?

CSV? That's structure.

Tab-separated columns? That's structure.

Fixed-width columns? Also structure.

You don't get to not have structure. Structure is always there. The question is whether you get to have a spec for your structure, or whether it's just "well, from the output it looks like column 3 here is always the hostname of the server I want, so I'll use 'cut' or 'awk' to extract it". That approach can work in practice, but...

jiggawatts• 6 years ago

That's it. And it turns out that's a pretty powerful abstraction

But that's not what an abstraction is! UNIX pipes are maximally low-level, as close to un-abstract as it is possible to get, except perhaps if it used bit-streams instead of byte-streams. It literally cannot get less abstract than that.

UNIX pipes are completely untyped, like a C codebase that uses only void* to pass all data. (Okay, some way of indicating end-of-stream is also needed, but it's still a good analogy.)

pipes are almost always the wrong tool if you do want structure

Not almost the wrong tool, entirely the wrong tool.

You can't magically shoehorn types back into an untyped system when all the existing components assume untyped streams.

PowerShell's structured and typed object streams is more UNIX than UNIX: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23423650

lmilcin• 6 years ago

You put this very nicely.

This is why functional programming and lisps are such fantastic development environment, because you can use components (functions) that are not very opinionated about what they are acting on.

ajuc• 6 years ago

It's a good analogy because you can make anything out of lego - even a car - but it won't be anything good for real use, just toys.

BTW if I was making UNIX command line today it would use LinkedHashMaps for everything instead of text streams.

jb36893• 6 years ago

Another fascinating thing is how we as a community reacted to this simplicity. One thing in particular that I find interesting is the conventions that have been built up. Many tools don't just accept text streams but react the same way to a common set of options and assume line-separation among other things. None of these are defined in the interface but were good ideas that were adopted between projects

crimsonalucard514• 6 years ago

Unix piping is basically functional programming.

If you ever wondered why some people are obsessed with functional programming this is the reason why:

Functional programming forces every primitive in your program to be a Lego Block.

A lot of functional programmers don't see the big picture. They see a sort of elegance with the functional style, they like the immutability but they can't explain the practical significance to the uninitiated.

Functional Programming is the answer to the question that has plagued me as a programmer for years. How do I organize my program in such a way that it becomes endlessly re-useable from a practical standpoint?

Functional programming transforms organ transplantation into lego building blocks.

The "lego" is the "function" and "connecting two lego blocks" is "function composition".

In short, another name for "Point free style" programming is "Lego building block style" programming.

xvedejas• 6 years ago

You can't just compose two functions because they're both written in a functional programming language. The programmer has to have the foresight to make their types compatible. I think the novelty of the Unix pipe for interoperability is that they (typically) work on one agreed-upon kind of data: human readable, white-space separated. So a lot of tools "just work" with each other.

There's no reason you can't do this with functional programming, but obviously you can do it with non-functional programming too, and you could certainly fail to do this with functional programming.

EGreg• 6 years ago

Want to build web apps from reusable blocks? Reason at a higher level about chatrooms, roles and permissions, credits? That was the thinking behind our open source project:

https://qbix.com/platform

Reusability on the web. Here is where we are going:

https://qbix.com/QBUX/whitepaper.html#Distributed-Operating-...

czbond• 6 years ago

You really just turned functional programming around for me. I learned CompSci object oriented (C++) but have always loved how easy data analysis was in unix output. Cheers for making me want to give it another look!

BiteCode_dev2• 6 years ago

Unix piping is basically functional programming

Except you litterally use side effects to communicate. Not really FP, that part.

hellofunk3• 6 years ago

I think this is a rather simplified and naïve analysis. Getting functional programs and functional APIs to compose well with each other is just as much a challenge as in other language paradigms. Just because the logic is organized as functions doesn’t magically make things fit together. Your APIs need to speak in a consistent way as well, and the arrangement of your data needs to be the same or easily convertible between your “Lego pieces“. Having spent many years of my career writing functional code all day, it is just as easy to make a mess of things in functional programs as it is an object oriented programs. I do not believe either is inherently better at creating the “Lego“–style.

mpweiher4• 6 years ago

Unix piping is basically functional programming.

Only in the same sense that all computing is Turing Machines or NAND gates.

This is a very common misunderstanding, but there is a reason that FP, which is transformational, had to adopt dataflow in order to sort-of handle reactive systems.

Functions run to completion and return their result. Filters tend to run concurrently and, importantly, do not return their results, they pass them on to the next filter in the pipeline.

It is possible to compose any two filters. It is not possible to compose any two functions, not even close, the default for functions is to not compose (arity, parameter types, return type,...).

c3534l2• 6 years ago

The goal of OOP is also to be modular and composable. I think the thing that is a good design choice is modular and composible. It's what the industrial revolution / assembly line was based on. It's what vim keybindings are based on. Heck, it's what programming languages themselves are based on. Here are some simple tools that do easily understandable things together, now put something together with it. Lego bricks are fun and useful and it's not the domain of any one area of CS.

heavyset_go• 6 years ago

One can say similar things about interfaces in object-oriented programming.

jmchuster3• 6 years ago

Is is not the same description for REST API? You pass in a text body and get back a text body? Everyone uses JSON instead of a complicated data protocol?

ehnto2• 6 years ago

A UNIX pipeline is more like a set of operations on the same object passing through the pipeline, and typically that object is a text file. REST APIs represent an ability to interact with a repository of information with a really specific protocol, yet the response is not in that same format as the input. You couldn't pass the response of a REST API into another REST API without managing it externally.

Consider

    cat myData | toolStripsWhitespace > myData

Versus

    var myData = RestApi->read(myDataRecordID)
    var mutatedData = someMutation(myData)
    RestApi->update(myDataRecordID, mutatedData)

You could of course write your ORM in a pipeline-like manner, many do. But that's got nothing to do with REST itself.

    var myData = new SomeObject(RestApi->read(myDataRecordID))
            ->someMutation('params')
            ->someOtherMutation('params')

    RestApi->update(myDataRecordID, myData->toJSON())

taneq2• 6 years ago

I'm not a Unix purist or anything, but they really hit on something special when it came to "code talking to other code".

I agree, and it just hit me while reading your comment that the special thing is not just that you can plug any program into any other program. It's that if one program doesn't work cleanly with another, this enforced simplicity means that you can easily modify the output of one program to work with another program. Unix command-line programs aren't always directly composable but they're adaptable in a way that other interfaces aren't.

It's not great for infrastructure, don't get me wrong. This isn't nuts and bolts. It's putty. But often putty is all you need to funnel the flow of information this one time.

edejong• 6 years ago

As long as each single project keeps reinventing their own Lego stubs, we won't be going forward with reuse.

With Haskell and Scala's type-system we seem to come closer to universal Lego. Still, like Lego, it can be hard to combine larger scale composites.

blobbers• 6 years ago

https://github.com/kohler/click is a library that I've found has a lot of reusability built into it, and operates a lot like snapping Lego blocks together.

When you're talking about not being able to reuse code, I think it depends on how you've designed your system. Design for reusability seems like it needs to be key goal in development in order to achieve software re-use.

davedx• 6 years ago

IMHO conflating “systems” and “components” here. Module and package management has never been better and building “a system” from components, open source or otherwise, is extremely effective. Integrating software systems (with e.g. API’s, webhooks and event busses) is non-trivial, complex and difficult. They are not the same endeavor.

lostcolony• 6 years ago

Really depends.

Building a system from components can be quite tricky, as the components tend to only play nicely together if they've been built for one another, or to some agreed upon spec. Otherwise you have to be very fluent in all of them, and write glue code. And there be dragons.

APIs tend to be all over the place, yes, but you can have a well defined API spec that really can allow specific implementations to be swapped out fairly trivially, such that it really is more like 'components'. Think SQL, for instance.

I think you may just be noticing that when things adhere to a spec, they tend to be able to combined pretty easily; if not, they don't.

medymed• 6 years ago

I would say software integration is more like a docking mechanism between spacestation units that were designed in isolation by different countries than like snapping LEGO blocks. At least software pieces are products of human design and failure points can be identified without the many inscrutable emergent phenomena and often-unmeasurable unknowns of biology.

leifg• 6 years ago

Totally gonna use that for marketing purposes :D

ozim• 6 years ago

OK but going all like it is not worth much because it is high chance of failure is not helpful. Once I got burned on quite good interview when I went a bit to far with notion that re usability in software is fake. In the end you have to fix some things but it is not like someone is going to die. Unless you really count on it and have really constrained budget, but in such case you asked for it.

bpyne• 6 years ago

Someone well-known in the IT field wrote about software reuse in the large vs. in the small about 10-15 years ago. The gist was that reuse in the small is a success, i.e. it's fairly simple to write a function that developers reuse within an application. When you try to generalize use beyond a certain context it becomes significantly more complicated to be successful. I think the motivation for the post was issues in object reuse in OO development. I'm trying to find the original post.

John D. Cook's post shines the light once again on the difficulty of writing reusable components.

hikarudo• 6 years ago

I would love to have a link to that piece about software reuse in the large vs in the small!

shadowgovt6• 6 years ago

Depends on the software. Or to torture the analogy a bit: you can build anything out of LEGO if you're willing to use a jigsaw, some Gorilla glue, a blowtorch...

The point of frameworks is to provide the standardization of the "shape" of various bits of software so it's a lot more like snapping together LEGO. But even then, LEGO isn't universally snappable; some blocks just don't click to other blocks in the product line. And then, of course, there's the "illegal" block hacks (https://crafty.diply.com/28429/14-illegal-lego-building-hack...) that work in practice but are not at all using the tool the way it's specified. When software reuse is like LEGO, we should expect (a) some things we want to do, we can't really do without jigsaws and glue and (b) sometimes, people will do things that the software technically allows but no sane person would call "desired" or "intended."

In fact, the LEGO-to-framework analogy works pretty great. And yeah, outside the context of a consistent (and, I'd argue, opinionated) framework, you're about as likely to have two pieces of software interoperate as you are likely to pick two random chunks of matter in the universe, slap them against each other, and have anything useful happen. I just tried it with a brick and this glass of water on my table. Now I have "wet brick in a pile of shattered glass," but I don't know anyone's going to give me a Series-A funding round for that.

aazaa• 6 years ago

The reason Lego works is a simple, well-defined interface. Two bricks stick together by friction because the stud pattern on one matches the hole pattern on the other precisely. Fortunately, that's a model that translates well to software.

The way to make software reuse more like organ transplant than building Legos is to ignore the advice to keep the interfaces simple and precise. Or worse, don't even bother defining an interface, its data types, or error conditions.

moonchild• 6 years ago

See also: Joe Armstrong, 'Why do we need modules at all?'

http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2011-May/058768...

ronanyeah• 6 years ago

I write full stack web in various functional programming languages, and I am constantly copy-pasting 'lego blocks' between projects. If the compiler is happy, I'm happy.

gcbw32• 6 years ago

That comparison is silly. I've never seen anything built with LEGOs on production.

ithkuil4• 6 years ago

not literally LEGOs, but many industries are based on repeated application of basic building blocks. The simplest and most ancient example are ... bricks: you build walls by composing objects of a few standardized sizes. This sounds obvious but it's not how things were always made; if you build a wall with stones, you have to invest more time into fitting them together neatly (and often you have to use a hammer to break larger stones apart). Construction has other examples of composition of prefabricated modules.

Another example, a lot of electronics was (and still is) implemented by combining discrete components with well known behaviours (things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7400-series_integrated_circuit...). At many levels in electronics you have abstractions upon abstractions (transistors -> logical gates -> multiplexers -> ALUs -> CPUs; communication busses, etc etc)

cgrealy4• 6 years ago

You can build a house with bricks. But you also need adhesive. And past a certain (very low) complexity, you probably use wooden framing, cut to size. And a different material for the roof, and glass for the windows and some kind of insulation, plastics for piping, and so on and so on and so on. And that’s not even getting started on more complex buildings.

As for electronics, yep, you start with discrete components, but as you said yourself, you quickly end up with specifically designed components for efficiency.

cgrealy4• 6 years ago

I read every comment waiting to see if someone would point out the obvious.

This blog is 100% accurate, and nearly everyone took the wrong point away from it.

There is a very good reason we don’t build anything but the most trivial structures from Lego.

Composability and reusability are great, but not at the expense of suitability for purpose.

You could build a house or a car out of Lego, but it would be worse on almost every possible metric than a regular house (unless your primary use case for your house is to take it apart and reconfigure it easily).

The same goes for software. You could build everything from unix pipes, but that rarely happens past the most trivial scale.

In fact, the clue is in the article. Evolution is not very tolerant of inefficient systems; animals haven’t evolved hot swappable organs, they have a complex interconnected system because 99% of the time, it works better.

crimsonalucard514• 6 years ago

Have you guys heard of functional programming?

Have you guys wondered why some people are so fanatic about functional programming?

Functional programming forces your program to be lego blocks by Definition.

A function with no side effects IS A Lego Block.

If I never discovered functional programming I'd be like John D. Cook, blogging about how programming is like organ transplantation.

Functional Programming is the answer to the question that has plagued me as a programmer for years: How do I organize/design my program in such a way that it becomes endlessly re-useable from a practical standpoint?

If this question plagues you as a programmer I urge you to take a closer look at functional programming. Specifically look at functions and function composition.

tiew9Vii• 6 years ago

Strongly typed functional programing ;)

...follow the types

Waterluvian• 6 years ago

My favourite form of software reuse is when I just use my old code as reference but import or duplicate almost none of it.

Feels so good to write similar software in 1/10th the time because the hard fought ideas are already won.

imhoguy• 6 years ago

That is knowledge reuse. Its hardly applicable with bigger project where the knowledge is spread across teams or even lost, then we have things like NIH or big-rewrites.

rhacker• 6 years ago

Is software just too easy to write that everything becomes incompatible. Everyone has the next best idea. It's XKCD 927 all the time.

Now if you instead look at Trucks and Campers, Rear Hitches, Fifth Wheels Hitches, Goose Neck Hitches. Every truck you can buy on the market today (with some strange exceptions Cybertruck cough) has very simple compatibility with all of these various trailer types. Yes in some cases you have to buy a mod kit, but when you look at the mod kit it literally bolts into pre-drilled holes in your truck frame. It's all plug and play.

I feel like the reason it's like this is because no one person can go off and design a truck in the dark. It's designed by many people and is beholden to customers.

Software, on the other hand, just gets built by whoever wants to build something. It doesn't have to fit some kind of standard. And it's not like there are a lot of standards that already exist in whatever it is that the software is doing.

In the real world however, you have Kubota tractors that need to fit a CAT bucket.

I mean just read this page:

https://www.spartanequipment.com/pages/buying-tips/attachmen...

Small quirks to it, but yeah, the rest of the world really is Legos, Software is organ transplant.

pagutierrezn• 6 years ago

If only organs could be connected with pipes

jmiskovic• 6 years ago

Lego is general graph structure. Our programs have roughly star topology - bunch of libraries and some control logic that drives it. Good libraries _are_ like snapping Lego blocks. Those have good scope around domain, well designed API and establish abstractions that don't leak. Think sqlite, zeromq, zlib. The central controlling part is too "involved" in domain and chosen tech stack to reuse easily.

The software that requires organ transplant just wasn't written to be reused. It is a matter of effort and cost. You cannot just solve your problem and wrap it in a library - you need to take care of all common use cases, define edge case behavior, test, document... It costs a lot more and that price is hard to justify. In the end it's the product that makes money and library is forgotten as long as it does its job. We need to fix the open-source income ecosystem.

stackzero• 6 years ago

Accurate IMO. You can get the components or organs but they don't snap together, more careful integration required...like surgery

aequitas• 6 years ago

When reading the title I figured it would explain something different to what the author does: when doing a organ transplant (except for the liver maybe) the organ is no longer usable to the donor.

Translatable to software, your reusable piece of code might not be so reusable as you think, missing lots of abstractions and having lots of specific code for just one specific consumer. Taking a piece of functionality from one part of your software and using it for something else might harm the original use due to broken API's, introduced complexity latency and failures, etc. Even ending up with having 2 split versions of your reusable component for each use case that you now have to maintain seperately.

app4soft• 6 years ago

Software reuse is more like an organ transplant than snapping Lego blocks

Funny, but Lego fans almost interpreted "organ transplant" exactly as "snapping Lego blocks".[0]

[0] http://xkcd.com/659/

orenkt• 6 years ago

So. Every editor has copy/paste functionality and search/replace. Using that plus following the SOLID principle is my way to reuse code. And it is as if I would build with LEGO bricks.

I tell you even a secret. Every piece of software has all the code you need to work with it already - just copy/paste stuff. You only need to know where it is. Every piece of software is it's own tutorial how to make that particular piece of software.

I've done this for years. I call my method of working copy/paste method.

And by reading this, I think I know why I piss so many programmers when I say what I do. And how fast I am with it.

pragmatic• 6 years ago

I disagree.

Never has it been easier to find existing code, download it and snap it into your project. Npm, nuget, etc, etc.

Also, on the front end there are no shortage of plug and play widget libraries.

Sometimes we need to take a step back and appreciate how things have improved over the years.

JoeMayoBot• 6 years ago

Exactly - with these packaging services, developers have learned how to make their software more re-usable. The 3rd party component eco-system is a multi-billion dollar industry that continues to grow.

Software reuse is more like an organ transplant than snapping Lego blocks (2011)

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