First there was "agile" development. Now there's a new software movement—called 'reactive' development—that sets out principles for building resilient and failure-tolerant applications for cloud, mobile, multicore and Web-scale systems. ReadWrite's Matt Asay sat down with Jonas Bonér, the author of the Reactive Manifesto (just released in version 2.0), for a discussion of what, exactly, the reactive movement aims to fix in software development and how we get there from here.
It can be summarized as software that is responsive, resilient, message driven and can handle varying loads gracefully. Compare with the Agile manifesto or perhaps the simple programming manifesto and the requirements that everyone ought to keep in mind. But the async manifesto is perhaps most efficient! But whatever you do, don't let anyone interrupt you.
(Score: 2) by mtrycz on Monday September 22 2014, @10:35AM
Lost it at "...and when failure does occur they meet it with elegance rather than disaster."
I mean, diversity can be a good thing, lots of great things have come from divesities, because at the end of the day the good enough for most people will survive.
Or you could go with the usual: common sense. Obviously The Daily WTF wouldn't have enought material with that. But I'm sure they will have some with the fads, too.
I'd like to have a rant on some buzzwords, but I don't even know enough of them to start. Let's start a competition, tho.
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(Score: 1) by Horse With Stripes on Monday September 22 2014, @11:09AM
I'm torn on that issue. Sure, a lot of the time I use a nice "try, catch, fail" approach. But every once in a while I like to use "on_error(system('halt -fnp'))".
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mtrycz on Monday September 22 2014, @11:57AM
To clarify: the thing that got me is the word "elegance". You're not an aestethist. You're a programmer/engeneer/developer. You make things work, you don't make things "meet with elegance".
That's when you know that what you're reading is a fad.
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(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Monday September 22 2014, @12:45PM
It is possible to endlessly pick holes in a database schema and everything built on top of it. However, it is possible to devise solutions which are mathematically elegant in the manner that the Euler characteristic [wikipedia.org] or that mass-energy equivalence [wikipedia.org] is elegant.
Unfortunately, most people are working in a problem-space where the solution is going to be ugly because there is an obviously bone-headed business requirement, it is NP-complete [wikipedia.org], a previous design decision which was obviously wrong or some other problem. For example, FTP sending directory listing in arbitrary text formats led to the following [joelonsoftware.com]:-
So, for example, FTP directory parsing code is never going to be elegant but it can be done in other cases.
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(Score: 2) by mtrycz on Monday September 22 2014, @02:03PM
1. Click on Euler characteristic
2. Ctrl+f
3. "eleg"
4. no results
Sciences aren't mean't to be "elegant". You're not an aesthetist.
Unless you want to end up in the "my science is better than your science because it's oooh so elegant" pit. I hate when matematicians say that.
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(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Monday September 22 2014, @02:42PM
If a formula which connects five Platonic solids [wikipedia.org] (and applies more generally) doesn't strike you as elegant then e^iπ+1=0 [wikipedia.org], connecting five fundamental constants, won't strike you as elegant either.
Overall, I am concerned that if you are unable to see elegance in simplicity [wikipedia.org], your software will be verbose and your scientific endeavors will be confused.
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(Score: 2) by mtrycz on Tuesday September 23 2014, @12:40PM
I'll go with what works.
Code needn't be elegant. It needs to be clear, sharable, debuggable, comunicable. Shorter code is better than longer code, as long as it doesn't sacrifice clearness. It needs to do its job. In maths short demonstrations are useless for learning a theorem if they doesn't actually explain it (as correct as it might be, example: induction)
I don't need to see elegance in lex parsimoniae. If it works, I'll go with it. Don't you see the problem with scientists striving for elegance?
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(Score: 1) by Zanothis on Tuesday September 23 2014, @04:21PM
I think you've fairly accurately described the definition of elegant [catb.org] that is being promoted in the manifesto and by cafebabe.
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Wednesday September 24 2014, @06:06AM
I believe your concern is a matter of false positives and false negatives. That is, a scientist who attempts to find a simple explanation for a complicated problem or attempts to find a complicated explanation for a simple problem. It is not easy to dismiss either case because it may lead to significant bias in further research. However, there are forces external to the scientist which bias simple explanations. First and foremost, a simple explanation is more able to propagate. Ignoring this, a simple explanation may be a grossly simplified model which is of no use. Alternatively, it may be a practical approximation. For example, Newton's laws are simple, linear approximations with practical application. Whereas, correctness would require the application of General Relativity. However, even this model may have some flaw or unknown omission. The point here is that we have a succession of models which were devised in good faith and that a more accurate model does not immediately obsolete all applications of the previous model. You may think that I am attempting some sleight-of-hand by citing physics models which move away from simplicity. However, there are examples, for example, in chemistry, in which additional data has led to simpler models.
Overall, I am troubled by the objection that you raise. The gulf between a presumed, objective reality and the rules we know affects everything and cannot be dismissed with hand-waving or a vague quest for the truth. Even if we were in a hypothetical situation where the rules did not diverge from observation, I would still be troubled. Firstly, it matters to me that the rules are correct and not just observed to be correct. (This is akin to the uncertainty which comes from software tests. They can easily show the presence of a bug but never prove the absence of bugs.) Secondly, it matters to me that the rules were derived correctly and with good intentions. (From what we know of mathematics, this may be impossible.)
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 22 2014, @09:33PM
It is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment... It seems that if one is working from the point of view of getting beauty in one's equations, and if one has really a sound insight, one is on a sure line of progress. If there is not complete agreement between the results of one's work and experiment, one should not allow oneself to be too discouraged, because the discrepancy may well be due to minor features that are not properly taken into account and that will get cleared up with further developments of the theory.
— Paul A. M. Dirac
Now, whom should I believe more in matters of science, a random user on Soylent News, or a famous scientists?
Also, did you know that the epicycles theory fitted the observed data better than Kepler's ellipses?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by romlok on Monday September 22 2014, @02:34PM
You're not an aestethist. You're a programmer/engeneer/developer. You make things work, you don't make things "meet with elegance".
That's when I know that you've never been an engineer or developer, or at least not a particularly good one.
A good engineer or developer absolutely takes account of the elegance of what they build. Elegance in software considers simplicity and clarity. Consequently, elegant solutions tend to be easier to understand, more flexible, more robust, and hence more maintainable.
(Score: 2) by mtrycz on Tuesday September 23 2014, @12:45PM
Hey, so how's your Reactive Manifesto 2.0 going?
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(Score: 2) by romlok on Tuesday September 23 2014, @02:27PM
To me, this "reactive programming" smells as much like buzzword bullshit, as your posts smell like someone who doesn't understand what we mean when we talk about "elegance".
Which is a lot.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 22 2014, @02:37PM
Whoosh
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 22 2014, @05:52PM
As a software developer, every time I hear someone utter the word elegant when referring to their own code, it means only the person that wrote it will understand it easily. Compound these "elegant" solutions throughout an application, and it quickly becomes an unmaintainable mess.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Marand on Monday September 22 2014, @11:32AM
Manifesto reads like buzzword bingo, supposedly written by a guy named "boner" -- this is some kind of troll-page satire, right?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by cafebabe on Monday September 22 2014, @11:37AM
Out of eight hyperlinks, I had certificate problems with two, one displays nothing useful because it requires JavaScript, one loads with low contrast and one has outsourced commenting with also requires JavaScript [soylentnews.org].
Publishing text on the Internet isn't rocket surgery. However, if these guys have such difficulty with static text, how can anything more substantial be trusted?
Ignoring that, I didn't realise that Agile development was such bunkum with gems such as [agilemanifesto.org]:-
and:-
To suggest that an ad hoc methodology is O(n), or less than O(n log n), is absurd and defies reality.
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(Score: 3, Funny) by khakipuce on Monday September 22 2014, @12:10PM
Come on, get with it, the links are great when they work and who wants static text when you can have feature rich pages with dancing penguins?
Clearly by following the reactive development methodology they have got "resilient and failure-tolerant applications for cloud, mobile, multicore and Web-scale systems" that are "message driven and can handle varying loads gracefully"
Biggest pile of horse bollocks to be found outside of a Tesco's frozen lasagne!
(Score: 5, Informative) by cafebabe on Monday September 22 2014, @01:00PM
Oh, sorry. I thought that I was following a 1.0 hyperlink. I'm just not ready for the awesomeness of a resilient, failure-tolerant, cloud, mobile, multi-core, Web-scale 2.0 hyperlink where I have to allow access to my clipboard, accelerometer, microphone, camera and address book to read some text. Obviously, these guys have a methodology where security and privacy is just a corollary of their process and they're too modest to mention it anywhere.
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(Score: 3, Funny) by tangomargarine on Monday September 22 2014, @04:30PM
Oh, quit your whining and get on the Probulator table already.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Friday October 03 2014, @08:58PM
Apparently, Jamie Zawinski had enough of this idiocy by 2001 and proposed a solution [jwz.org].
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by kaszz on Monday September 22 2014, @01:00PM
I found the Async manifesto most interesting. Otoh any programmer worth their salt should have figured out this on their own.
http://asyncmanifesto.org/ [asyncmanifesto.org]
(Score: 2) by tibman on Monday September 22 2014, @02:37PM
This reactive manifesto seems to be in a totally different area than agile and async. It governs systems and not developers. I like that Async manifesto : )
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 22 2014, @02:10PM
…
..
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
(Score: 2) by goodie on Monday September 22 2014, @08:33PM
Great, a cert security warning when I tried to click on this... Well, for one, this is not about people, values etc. like the Agile Manifesto, the Async Manifesto etc. This merely describes properties of "systems". I'm not sure I see much interest in this, a lot of it seems to make sense but seems to also be based on an infinite sense of elasticity of resources... Something I sure would love in real life but I'm not sure we can all afford :)
I liked the other docs linked here though, fun reads :)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 23 2014, @07:17AM
Ok, for those interested, I just created my own religion: the Singleton Group [singleton.org], and we have a manifesto [singleton.org] indeed. Hey, I'm going to be famous!