Prologue Comments about book HOT 6 CLOSED

I’m not sure that software is inherently unstable without energy.

That's fair. The idea I'm grasping toward, I guess, is that the maintainability of a piece of software naturally trends downward as the complexity increases. It takes directed energy to prevent that by continuously refactoring and moving further up the abstraction ladder.

from book.

Right, trying to wrack my brain for a better metaphor for something that decays without oversight as it grows.

from book.

gardening?

from book.

from book.

ok have addressed points 1 and 3. just need to figure out a way to express this:

You can explain DI more easily once you have introduced layers by noting that as we depend downwards, it becomes impossible to use something from a higher layer.

from book.

Re: metaphors, one of our engineers likes to use the term "code gardening" for tech debt, so that's a fine idea. I'm just throwing a few more ideas out to spark some lateral thinking, and since Harry was tweeting about "Cosmic Python".

WRT "energy" and "stability" (if you were still going to use that metaphor) arguably energy or entropy also comes in the form of changing requirements, new feature requests, new technologies, changes to the team, etc.

Some other pattern nicknames/metaphors from the original BBOM piece include "Shantytown", "Potemkin Viliage", "Urban Sprawl", trench warfare.

For DI, perhaps you could put the very first part of the filesystem example in the prologue? It would create kind of a cliffhanger and a concrete example to motivate DI. Then in the following chapters, do the refactors to FCIS and DI.

On a 'Buzzword': Hierarchical Structure is very old, but I think relevant to the discussion around layers. It may be helpful.

from book.