metablog: Glue: the Dark Matter of Software

The same feeling has been nagging me pretty me much ever since I started writing software. On the one hand, there is the magic, almost literally: we write some text (spells) and the machine does things in the real world. On the other hand, it seems just way too much work to make the machine do anything more complex than: 10 PRINT "Hello"
20 GOTO 10 Almost like threading a needle with boxing gloves. And that's even if we are careful, if we avoid unnecessary complexity.

And the numbers appear to back that up, Alan Kay mentions Microsoft office at several hundred million lines of code. From my personal experience, the Wunderlist iOS client was not quite 200 KLOC. For the latter, I can attest to the attention given by the team to not introduce unnecessary bloat, and even to actively reduce it. (For example, we cut our core code by around 30KLOC thanks to some of the architectural mechanisms such as Storage Combinators). I am fairly sure I am not the only one with this experience.

hexagonal architecture has enabled me to extract the business logic in the product i’m building and currently it’s less than 5% of all code— 3. life out of balance (@infinitary) November 25, 2017 So why so much code? After all Wunderlist was just a To Do List, albeit a really nice one. I can't really say much about Office, I don't think anyone can, because 400 MLOC is just way too much code to comprehend. I think the answer is:

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