Comment by chillpenguin

9 months ago

"john ousterhout's book is the only book on how to write software that has any actual evidence behind it."

This is false and hopefully no one takes you seriously when they read that. There are books about empirical methods for software engineering, for example, which actually seek to find real evidence for software engineering techniques. See Greg Wilson's work, for example.

There are lots of other architecture/design books that use real world systems as examples. "Evidence" is definitely lacking in our field, but you can find it if you try.

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chillpenguin

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froh  9 months ago

Greg Wilson indeed is tremendously helpful in facilitating "the industry" to think about our craft:

https://github.com/gvwilson

edit: wow, in his project "It will never work in theory" he's fairly sober about the ability of "the industry" to reflect on "the craft"

https://neverworkintheory.org/

> about the project:

> People have been building complex software for over sixty years, but until recently, only a handful of researchers had studied how it was actually done. Many people had opinions—often very strong ones—but most of these were based on personal anecdotes or the kind of "it's obvious" reasoning that led Aristotle to conclude that heavy objects fall faster than light ones.

in the 2024 retrospective:

> Conclusion

> The comedian W.C. Fields once said, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There’s no point in being a damn fool about it.” Thirteen years after our first post, it is clear that our attempts to bridge the gulf between research and practice haven’t worked. We look forward to hearing what actionable plans others have that will find real support from both communities.

  • WillAdams  9 months ago

    The annals of the IEEE and ACM would argue against:

    >only a handful of researchers had studied how it was actually done

    I am pretty sure that there are more than 5 references to papers in APoSD.