Comments on: Little programs versus big programs

By: Randy A MacDonald

Randy A MacDonald — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 15:33:32 +0000

In APL, even programs that do many things do not have to be big. APL programs are as big as the problem they are solving, i.e. they have a length of 1 problem.

TO paraphrase another Randy, “Big programs have no reason to live.”

By: F. Andy Seidl

F. Andy Seidl — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 01:24:20 +0000

Big programs, poorly architected are a nightmare. But big programs, well architected are a pleasure. And when you find–or design–the latter, more often than not, you’ll find a big program that is really a federation of many small programs (or services), each of which does something very specific and very well.

By: Brendan Ribera

Brendan Ribera — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 17:26:18 +0000

"UNIX is lots of little programs connected by shell scripts, Java is big programs connected by XML" - Stuart Sierra

By: richard

richard — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 16:58:22 +0000

Omar,

I took a second year course in SE last year that, amongst other things, covered cohesion, coupling, components etc.

It was quite interesting.

By: Style and understanding — The Endeavour

Style and understanding — The Endeavour — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 23:07:41 +0000

[...] understanding is missing.” Understanding is nearly always missing to some extent on any large project. We hardly ever understand what we’re doing so thoroughly that we can completely disregard [...]

By: Omar Gómez

Omar Gómez — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 01:13:17 +0000

Big programs are interesting. Programmers learn to to think about programs in terms of small quantities (lines of code, classes, etc). This comes from Universities where too much emphasis is put in computer science (syntax and algorithmic view).
Big system are complex beasts, you can’t use the programmer view. You need to identity structures in terms of cohesion, coupling, contracts, components, etc. You need to see beyond code. Wish Universities understands this.

By: John

John — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 14:12:15 +0000

I admire people like Michael Feathers and John Robbins who enjoy digging into large legacy projects, but that's not how I prefer to earn a living.

By: sean mcbeth

sean mcbeth — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 14:05:22 +0000

Ain’t that the truth.

Actually, I like embarking on large projects for personal projects, because I see it as an opportunity to learn more about available tools past just programming languages. The programming language you select is often inconsequential compared to having the right tool chain to go with it.