Thinking About Glue – O’Reilly

In Glue: the Dark Matter of Software, Marcel Weiher asks why there’s so much code. Why is Microsoft Office 400 million lines of code? Why are we always running into the truth of Alan Kay’s statement that “Software seems ‘large’ and ‘complicated’ for what it does”?

Weiher makes an interesting claim: the reason we have so much code is Glue Code, the code that connects everything together. It’s “invisible and massive”; it’s “deemed not important”; and, perhaps most important, it’s “quadratic”: the glue code is proportional to the square of the number of things you need to glue. That feels right; and in the past few years, we’ve become increasingly aware of the skyrocketing number of dependencies in any software project significantly more complex than “Hello, World!” We can all add our own examples: the classic article Hidden Technical Debt in Machine Learning Systems shows a block diagram of a system in which machine learning is a tiny block in the middle, surrounded by all sorts of infrastructure: data pipelines, resource management, configuration, etc. Object Relational Management (ORM) frameworks are a kind of glue between application software and databases. Web frameworks facilitate gluing together components of various types, along with gluing that front end to some kind of back end. The list goes on.

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