I was recently having a conversation with some coworkers about this.

IMO a lot of (software) engineering wisdom and best practices fails in the face of business requirements and logic. In hard engineering you can push back a lot harder because it's more permanent and lives are more often on the line, but with software, it's harder to do so.

I truly believe the constraints of fast moving business and inane, non sensical requests for short term gains (to keep your product going) make it nearly impossible to do proper software engineering, and actually require these if-else nests to work properly. So much so that I think we should distinguish between software engineering and product engineering.

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andix 10 days ago | parent | next [-]

> a lot of (software) engineering wisdom and best practices fails in the face of business requirements

They fail on reality. A lot of those "best" practices assume, that someone understands the problem and knows what needs to be built. But that's never true. Building software is always an evolutionary process, it needs to change until it's right.

Try to build an side project, that doesn't accept any external requirements, just your ideas. You will see that even your own ideas and requirements shift over time, a year (or two) later your original assumptions won't be correct anymore.

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ttz 9 days ago | parent [-]

You can still design for evolution and follow best practices. That's actually IMO a hallmark of good software design.

The issue is when the evolution is random and rife with special cases and rules that cannot be generalized... the unknown unknowns of reality, as you say.

Then, you just gotta patch with if elses.

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andix 9 days ago | parent [-]

> The issue is when the evolution is random and rife with special cases and rules that cannot be generalized

You’ve just described the universe. It’s full of randomness.

	▲	ttz 9 days ago \| parent [-]
		Thank you for this relevant insight.

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sky2224 9 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is how I feel as well. What's even worse is that it seems like the academics doing research in the area of software engineering don't really have up to date experience that's practical.

Add to the fact that they're the professor of many software engineering courses and you start to see why so many new grads follow SOLID so dogmatically, which leads to codebases quickly decaying.

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markus_zhang 9 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I kinda think only system programming is programming.