As we speed-run the history of software engineering via trying to make AI coding reliable, repeatable, robust, and resilient...
We sometimes (re)discover something useful for software engineering in general. Checking architectural decision documents, requirements, constraints, and other artefacts in with the code ensures we have the reason for every fence close at hand when we consider removing it, and we have the history of those reasons alongside the code we wrote according to that history.
When I was with GitHub, I championed a product idea nobody wanted: Make GitHub's web editor and support for markup languages so good that we'd have a lightweight but useful alternative to GDocs, PowerPoint, &c.
Then there would be a path for storing docs in the same repo as the code *and* to diff those docs so we could match updates to the docs wth updates to the code.
That's why I put my heart and soul into shipping Rich Prose Diffs: https://github.blog/news-insights/the-library/rendered-prose-diffs/
I had dreams. Or perhaps, madness.
@raganwald Literate programming and keeping docs in sync with code are consummations devoutly to be wished.
Rich Prose Diffs sound somewhere in line with structural diffs of code - preserving things other than the character sequence. (character sequence vs. octet sequence being its own thing)
Devoutly to be wished by me, anyway, I guess the focus groups or business planners didn't care for it?
@jmeowmeow Product choices are always way more complicated than a simple "The idiots refused to listen to meeeeeee..."
I can't repeat internal discussions, but I'll wave gently in the direction of "sometimes you have to put more wood behind fewer arrows."
@raganwald (nodding) "waves gently in the direction of my last Google all hands"
It sometimes feels like it's that we have no idea how to run innovative riffs in ways that let them grow and evolve, they have to be Web Scale out of the gate.
@raganwald I actually had this discussion with a Microsoft interviewer in 1997. "Why do I want to work here? Because MS is in a position to observe broadly and discover winning technologies throughout the field and implement them well."
No hire, I was too slow at Eight Queens on the whiteboard, I didn't have the goal directed retry algorithm to mind in the moment. Which maybe I should have, since I had learned Icon in my MS programme.
@jmeowmeow I wrote a whole blog post about eight queens but I'm pretty sure I would fail that problem if it was given to me *before* I wrote the post.
@raganwald We had an informal programming study group at Walt Disney's Seattle office where N-Queens came up. I see it's been a few years since.
Reginald
Marianne
Jan D
Michael Roberts
Jeff Miller (orange hatband)
Badly-read literary snob