Granger: Software engineering must gain power through simplicity, not complexity
Chris Granger · The Future of Software Development · Jul 15, 2017 · at 4:11
This episode carries Chris Granger's own address, with nobody on the show putting questions to them. It still counts as said, and it is kept out of every score on their page.
Chris Granger, co-founder of Eve, outlines core principles for modern software architecture during his talk at the 2014 a16z Academic Roundtable.
0:00 / 0:16exact quote · 16.3s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“What we're really trying to get back to is simplicity, right? Instead of adding more teacups on top of this thing, wipe all the teacups away and find the foundational principles that we need in order to embrace this new machine, right? Gain power through simplicity, not more complexity.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Chris Granger
Granger: Excel is the world's most popular programming language
“The most popular programming language in the world is Excel. It is programming just like everything else is. And Excel is used by eight hundred million people every single day, right?”
Granger: Programming languages model computer hardware rather than human processes
“We have this weird case right now where our languages, Python, pick any language, right? Is actually designed to model computer interaction, right? It's designed to model how computers work. Like, I'm gonna send TCP messages, and so on and so forth. But if you…”
Granger: C and the actor model cannot solve modern computing challenges
“You know, C is not going to save us. You can't just stick the actor model on top of it and hope it's going to work.”
Granger: Turning everyone into software programmers is neither realistic nor desirable
“I don't know that it's realistic, though, that, or even desirable, right, that we end up with, you know, far more programmers than we end up with anything else.”
Granger: Managing software complexity by stacking abstractions creates fragile systems
“Pure engineering makes this very pragmatic trade-off, right, which is that you tame complexity by adding a layer of abstraction. And this is like stacking teacups on top of teacups, right? You can do this for a little while, but eventually those teacups, that …”
Granger: Software bugs provide feedback on flawed thinking rather than signaling failure
“So you think about, like, when you get a wrong answer in, in a math class, right? You got it wrong, so you redo the problem. You just did it wrong, right? I mean, you do it right, or you do it as many times as you need to until you get it right. Whereas in sof…”