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Author | Topic: Design evidence # 111: The heart | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Percy Member Posts: 22508 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.4 |
Sonnikke writes: That's a non-sequitur if I've seen one. What kind of logic is this? Because something designed can be simple thus complexity cannot be related to design? No, I believe you've misunderstood what Peter was saying. To exaggerate a little to help make the point, the most complex designs are often Rube Goldberg tributes to ineptitude. Something designed really well is elegant in its simplicity and an icon of efficiency. This means that you're looking at things backward. You're arguing that the more complex something is the more likely it is to have been designed when actually the opposite is true. It takes much intellectual effort to arrive at a clean and efficient design. If you just consider the genomes of organisms, many seem Rube Goldbergian in their needless complexities with long stretches of junk, redundancies, multilayered enabling and de-enabling of genes, etc. Such tortured and needlessly complex systems seem much more likely the result of random events than of conscious design. --Percy
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Peter Member (Idle past 1510 days) Posts: 2161 From: Cambridgeshire, UK. Joined: |
Percipient's take on my meaning was my intention, so
I don't really need to say anything else .... but I will A feature of good design is simplicity, not complexity.
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lpetrich Inactive Member |
Actually, some human designs do tend to acquire that property -- computer source code maintained by several people, for example.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.6 |
And that is because the maintenance of computer code is closer to evolution than it is to a straightforward design-and-build methodology.
In both cases incremental changes are added to the original structures, which were never designed to accomodate them.
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Peter Member (Idle past 1510 days) Posts: 2161 From: Cambridgeshire, UK. Joined: |
Yes ... and it's also considered extremely bad practice.
'Spontaneous elabroation' of code works very much like naturalselection:: Add a bit and see if it did what you wanted it to.If it did, it stays, otherwise modify it a bit
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.6 |
What I am talking about is less than ideal, but a practical necessity.
It is not possible to completely rewrite every program in a suite for every release - not if you want to release on a reasonable schedule. Nor is it practical to forsee every change or addition that might be required at the initial design stage. Then there is the issue of assigning work. So programs acquire functions piecemeal, added by different people - sometimes involving quite radical changes. As this happens that program gets more and more complicated. (Sometimes - and this IS very bad - it gets to the point where parts of the code are "off limits" for any further change - even to fix bugs).
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compmage Member (Idle past 5184 days) Posts: 601 From: South Africa Joined: |
PaulK writes;
quote: Unfortunately we have a program like that running at the company I work for. Written in 1989, almost 8000 lines of code and 69 large scale alterations. Nobody here wants to touch the monster. Mention the name and everyone is suddenly far to busy to even have a look at it. ------------------Signature too long, 100 chars max.
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Peter Member (Idle past 1510 days) Posts: 2161 From: Cambridgeshire, UK. Joined: |
Believe me I appreciate the practical problems, but a
good software design lends itself to extension The software development process is evolving itself,compmage pointed out a 1989 program that is causing headaches in his/her company ... and legacy code of that age is always a nightmare to deal with!! The point being made though, was that good designs aresimple, elegant even. And this is more often the case, even in software, when there is a single designer and maintainer. I mainly deal with real-time control systems (closer toorganic systems in concept than large and unwieldy accounting systems etc.) and these have to be designed well from the outset, and implemented as designed if you don't want castrophes. I think you were agreeing with the simplicity in gooddesign idea though, since you pointed out that that kind of development was like evolution ... and results in messy sub-optimal, over-complex solutions.
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Peter Member (Idle past 1510 days) Posts: 2161 From: Cambridgeshire, UK. Joined: |
What language is that in? 8000 lines seems a little
sedate {edited 'cause I forgot the smiley} [This message has been edited by Peter, 03-03-2003]
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.6 |
I am definitely agree that simplicity is a hallmark of good design.
I was adding the idea that continued iterative modification with no overall plan is a recipe for complexity. Unfortunately when you are on the treadmill of product development it is hard to find the time to stop for a complete redesign.
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nator Member (Idle past 2200 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
Wow, I've never heard of getting MORE wisdom teeth than the usual four.
I'm sorry, it must have been painful.
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DanskerMan Inactive Member |
Design Design Design, all this mention of design, simple or complex, it is still *designed*, and didn't "just happen by chance".
What is simple? Who has the knowledge to *know* what is perfectly ideal? How can anyone claim such simplistic deductions (ie. good design is simple) without knowing what is good, what is simple, what is necessary, how to design it, build it, maintain it, etc. The more interdependant something is, how simplistic can it effectively get? Who can answer something like that absolutely? It baffles me the most, that designers (computer programmers, engineers, etc) *deny* the Creator, when they themselves are mini-creators/designers. S.
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Admin Director Posts: 13046 From: EvC Forum Joined: Member Rating: 2.7 |
The software for this website is 43,000 lines of Perl code.
--------------------EvC Forum Administrator
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Quetzal Member (Idle past 5903 days) Posts: 3228 Joined: |
You bring up an excellent point here, sonnikke. However, it works against you as well as against the argument you were addressing: how can anyone claim design without "knowing what is good, what is simple, what is necessary, how to design it, build it, maintain it, etc."? How IS it possible to detect design - whether human or divine - without knowing the actual causative history of the particular object or system? How can we objectively tell that this is designed but that isn't?
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.6 |
So essentially you are denying that we can recognise design in living beings. That is the consequence of your assertions. But if we cannot then your whole argument falls apart.
And yes, interdependancies are EXACTLY the sort of complexity I was talking about. Good design avoids that sort of complexity, iterative modifications may be forced into adding them.
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