I managed to attend a few book-signings of great authors (Salman Rushdie, Richard Dawkins, and, long ago, Beverly Cleary), but would kill for this Yourdon-Constantine one, as well as the story behind it.
I actually worked for a CASE vendor that started by building tools to apply Yourdon et al.'s Structured Analysis and Structured Design to important systems, in mil/aerospace/datacom. (I was lucky to be the teen mascot on our full-lifecycle evolution of those tools, in the Portland division, and then on an R&D team at HQ for next-gen OO CASE.)
Yourdon also collaborated with Peter Coad on a pair of books for OO development.
To this day, I still find Yourdon et al.'s DFDs (from Structured Analysis) to be one of the first and most powerful tools for eliciting process/system understanding, from business people and techies alike, even if they've never seen it. Put loosely, it seems half of all business/org problems lately could be solved by leading people through a DFD exercise.
The Selfish Gene was amazing to me when I first read it in the early 2000s and after reading The God Delusion I dove into his back catalog and followed his publications for a while but it honestly felt like throughout his books he largely kept re-hashing the same ideas with little novel insight, only occasionally refining his rhetoric or looking for new ways to present what he had already said. In retrospect, I struggle to even define what distinguished one book from another when it comes to everything he published after The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype.
It felt a bit like he took the "publish or perish" approach from academia to publishing. It also feels like his decline in academic publishing (according to Wikipedia, his last academic papers seem to have been published in 2004 and his last popular articles in 2008) correlates with his infatuation with his then-celebrity status during the New Atheism wave and his eventual descent into anti-progressivism (or more charitably: Twitter drama) and his hyperfixation on Islam (which incidentally mirrors the development of a lot of more mundane content creators who got their start in "debunking" creationists and in some cases have come full (semi?) circle to Christian conservatism and anti-atheism).
Yeah, Yourdon DFDs (with something like fairly low-formality Cockburn-style use cases as the minispecs for process bubbles) äre an awesome tool for understanding and communicating about systems, and are super accessible.
Some people like it. I would find it annoying except they used to do it all the time in the 18th century and it's kind of fun that an old convention came back.
> Some people like it & I would find it annoying except they used to do it all the time in the 18th century & it's kind of fun that an old convention came back.
Obviously it's fallen out of fashion, but it is/was just a shorthand way of writing "and" & it used to be pretty normal to just use it every time. It's not really something you can use "excessively"; either you write "and" as "&" or you don't.
Kent Beck's work is important to the field of software, starting since before techbros were a thing, and ongoing.
When a field becomes known as a "get rich quick" career, and there's a massive influx people into the field... it's a little sadly-funny to realize that more people in the field know the names of people who got the most rich, than know the names of people who helped get the field itself to that point (through craft/avocation/research/etc.).
> Alan Kay has every right to be bitter. He's a great software architect, and came up with OOP as a perfectly reasonable policy for managing complexity. Now most people associate OOP with commercial garbage and that VisitorSingletonFactory nonsense.
> If you came up with a set of really good ideas that were later bastardized and mutated into the sort of business horseshit that's destroying software, wouldn't you be pissed off?
When I had the option of learning CS and knowing I'd be learning Java (ie VisitorSingletonFactory) I wish I'd known that it was a short lived fad and nothing near what Kay intended.
For anyone else unfamiliar with "XP" in this context:
"Extreme programming (XP) is a software development methodology intended to improve software quality and responsiveness to changing customer requirements. As a type of agile software development, it advocates frequent releases in short development cycles, intended to improve productivity and introduce checkpoints at which new customer requirements can be adopted."
His own writings aren't that bad but he's the Dr. Oz to the agile-charlatans. (e.g. Dr. Oz had to explain to Congress that he had no idea whatsoever why his face was on so many ads for scam weight loss products.)
I'm laughing at the moment. I saw this post and realized the author was Kent Beck and thought oh wow he has a new book coming out. Then saw he posted this to HN and thought wow HN is amazing you get posts directly from famous people. To see someone then dismissing the post as the author is no one made me laugh.
"Famous person" feels like a very pre-21st century concept at this point. Like it or not, celebrity status is fractal in the age of influencers. There are people you and I have never heard of and will likely never hear about making an impact on millions right now.
Kent Beck's claim to fame are JUnit, Extreme Programming and his contributions to capital-A Agile. JUnit is still extremely popular but hasn't been associated with him for a while. Capital-A Agile and Extreme Programming, like JUnit/SUnit, were highly influential at the time but relative to the scale of the industry can be considered niche at this point. Everyone who has spent any time in the industry has most likely heard of "agile" but nowadays that can mean anything from full-fledged SCRUM to "we use Trello". Likewise "we do TDD" often simply means "we try to maintain some level of test coverage".
Again, I'm not discounting the impact of his contributions. He popularized a lot of ideas that have had a lasting impact or even survived to this day. However we as a culture have a tendency to glorify the achievements of individuals rather than seeing them as parts of a wider context: Extreme Programming for example is largely a collection of practices that already existed at the time and explicitly builds on them.
If you're a Smalltalk programmer in the 1990s or any kind of software professional in the early 2000s, you must have been very culturally isolated not to have heard of Kent Beck directly or indirectly. But complaining in the mid-2020s that someone might consider him a "nobody" because they genuinely have never heard of him ridiculous is kind of like complaining about youngsters not knowing who famous Hollywood A-list celebrities Anne Bancroft, Rex Harrison or Natalie Wood are. Fame is momentary and fleeting.
EDIT: At the risk of making you feel old (it certainly makes me feel old): the mid-2000s were 20 years ago, the mid-1990s were 30 years ago. There are software developers who have been doing their job for a decade and were born after the Gang of Four book was first published.
Others have refuted the "--someone not famous" part of your shallow dismissal so I won't go there, but also my understanding from the post is that "few people know about" is because the book isn't published yet.
I managed to attend a few book-signings of great authors (Salman Rushdie, Richard Dawkins, and, long ago, Beverly Cleary), but would kill for this Yourdon-Constantine one, as well as the story behind it.
I actually worked for a CASE vendor that started by building tools to apply Yourdon et al.'s Structured Analysis and Structured Design to important systems, in mil/aerospace/datacom. (I was lucky to be the teen mascot on our full-lifecycle evolution of those tools, in the Portland division, and then on an R&D team at HQ for next-gen OO CASE.)
Yourdon also collaborated with Peter Coad on a pair of books for OO development.
To this day, I still find Yourdon et al.'s DFDs (from Structured Analysis) to be one of the first and most powerful tools for eliciting process/system understanding, from business people and techies alike, even if they've never seen it. Put loosely, it seems half of all business/org problems lately could be solved by leading people through a DFD exercise.
> Richard Dawkins
The Selfish Gene was amazing to me when I first read it in the early 2000s and after reading The God Delusion I dove into his back catalog and followed his publications for a while but it honestly felt like throughout his books he largely kept re-hashing the same ideas with little novel insight, only occasionally refining his rhetoric or looking for new ways to present what he had already said. In retrospect, I struggle to even define what distinguished one book from another when it comes to everything he published after The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype.
It felt a bit like he took the "publish or perish" approach from academia to publishing. It also feels like his decline in academic publishing (according to Wikipedia, his last academic papers seem to have been published in 2004 and his last popular articles in 2008) correlates with his infatuation with his then-celebrity status during the New Atheism wave and his eventual descent into anti-progressivism (or more charitably: Twitter drama) and his hyperfixation on Islam (which incidentally mirrors the development of a lot of more mundane content creators who got their start in "debunking" creationists and in some cases have come full (semi?) circle to Christian conservatism and anti-atheism).
Yeah, Yourdon DFDs (with something like fairly low-formality Cockburn-style use cases as the minispecs for process bubbles) äre an awesome tool for understanding and communicating about systems, and are super accessible.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data-flow_diagram
What's "Tidy First"? Is this a book I should have heard of?
The author of this piece is Kent Beck, who has written on software before. https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/25211.Kent_Beck
He is one of the "Agile Manifesto" people: his name is on this page https://agilemanifesto.org/
His books are rightly well-known. He appears to be discussing his upcoming new book. It doesn't seem to be out yet.
ooooh. yeah he wrote the book on Test Driven Development.
I had the same question initially, I thought tidy first was one of those home keeping books.
a lot of lessons learned from working on software apply to the rest of life!
I think this link to an event his publisher is organizing discusses some relevant context to understand the post: https://www.oreilly.com/live-events/software-architecture-ho...
I got to meet Ed Yourdon several years ago (he came to interview me, amazingly). No one else at the company knew who he was.
is Tidy First? a book I can read or does it require reading the substack in reverse order?
It will be a book.
Off-topic, but the writing style seems to use "&" excessively. Did anyone else find that disruptive?
Some people like it. I would find it annoying except they used to do it all the time in the 18th century and it's kind of fun that an old convention came back.
> Some people like it & I would find it annoying except they used to do it all the time in the 18th century & it's kind of fun that an old convention came back.
FT&FY
Obviously it's fallen out of fashion, but it is/was just a shorthand way of writing "and" & it used to be pretty normal to just use it every time. It's not really something you can use "excessively"; either you write "and" as "&" or you don't.
[flagged]
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The audience is expected to know the title of a book that hasn’t been released. It’s not shallow to point that out.
Points about titles are usually pretty shallow to begin with, and when you combine that with a snarky one-liner, I think it qualifies.
Might be that hacker news isn't the intended audience, but the blog's readers are.
Kent Beck's work is important to the field of software, starting since before techbros were a thing, and ongoing.
When a field becomes known as a "get rich quick" career, and there's a massive influx people into the field... it's a little sadly-funny to realize that more people in the field know the names of people who got the most rich, than know the names of people who helped get the field itself to that point (through craft/avocation/research/etc.).
See also: Alan Kays comment on software engineering pop culture.
HN comment thread from 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4956430
Great comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4956720
> Alan Kay has every right to be bitter. He's a great software architect, and came up with OOP as a perfectly reasonable policy for managing complexity. Now most people associate OOP with commercial garbage and that VisitorSingletonFactory nonsense.
> If you came up with a set of really good ideas that were later bastardized and mutated into the sort of business horseshit that's destroying software, wouldn't you be pissed off?
When I had the option of learning CS and knowing I'd be learning Java (ie VisitorSingletonFactory) I wish I'd known that it was a short lived fad and nothing near what Kay intended.
Kent beck is an incredibly famous software engineer.
Invented XP, and the wrote the most well known book on TDD.
For anyone else unfamiliar with "XP" in this context:
"Extreme programming (XP) is a software development methodology intended to improve software quality and responsiveness to changing customer requirements. As a type of agile software development, it advocates frequent releases in short development cycles, intended to improve productivity and introduce checkpoints at which new customer requirements can be adopted."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_programming
His own writings aren't that bad but he's the Dr. Oz to the agile-charlatans. (e.g. Dr. Oz had to explain to Congress that he had no idea whatsoever why his face was on so many ads for scam weight loss products.)
XP at the time was pretty good. A lot of people started doing CI of the back of XP.
I'd say he's pretty sad about how agile turned out. Its pretty different to what XP advocated for in a lot of organisations.
The thing is the agile-charlatans copied his style for talking about how programming teams should be organized.
That's the charlatans' fault, not Kent's.
Just to pile on - Kent Beck was one of the authors of JUnit. His credentials are pretty solid.
I'm laughing at the moment. I saw this post and realized the author was Kent Beck and thought oh wow he has a new book coming out. Then saw he posted this to HN and thought wow HN is amazing you get posts directly from famous people. To see someone then dismissing the post as the author is no one made me laugh.
"Famous person" feels like a very pre-21st century concept at this point. Like it or not, celebrity status is fractal in the age of influencers. There are people you and I have never heard of and will likely never hear about making an impact on millions right now.
Kent Beck's claim to fame are JUnit, Extreme Programming and his contributions to capital-A Agile. JUnit is still extremely popular but hasn't been associated with him for a while. Capital-A Agile and Extreme Programming, like JUnit/SUnit, were highly influential at the time but relative to the scale of the industry can be considered niche at this point. Everyone who has spent any time in the industry has most likely heard of "agile" but nowadays that can mean anything from full-fledged SCRUM to "we use Trello". Likewise "we do TDD" often simply means "we try to maintain some level of test coverage".
Again, I'm not discounting the impact of his contributions. He popularized a lot of ideas that have had a lasting impact or even survived to this day. However we as a culture have a tendency to glorify the achievements of individuals rather than seeing them as parts of a wider context: Extreme Programming for example is largely a collection of practices that already existed at the time and explicitly builds on them.
If you're a Smalltalk programmer in the 1990s or any kind of software professional in the early 2000s, you must have been very culturally isolated not to have heard of Kent Beck directly or indirectly. But complaining in the mid-2020s that someone might consider him a "nobody" because they genuinely have never heard of him ridiculous is kind of like complaining about youngsters not knowing who famous Hollywood A-list celebrities Anne Bancroft, Rex Harrison or Natalie Wood are. Fame is momentary and fleeting.
EDIT: At the risk of making you feel old (it certainly makes me feel old): the mid-2000s were 20 years ago, the mid-1990s were 30 years ago. There are software developers who have been doing their job for a decade and were born after the Gang of Four book was first published.
It's important to note that SUnit begat other unit testing frameworks, and that the interactive nature of Smalltalk lent itself to a fluid workflow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUnit
Others have refuted the "--someone not famous" part of your shallow dismissal so I won't go there, but also my understanding from the post is that "few people know about" is because the book isn't published yet.
Could be a useful book for ChatGPT to read