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Comment by DenisM | Hacker News Reader

Another possible conclusion from your analysis is that a proper architectural separation of concerns (which could allow one to bang out code like he's still on that plane) has not been practiced in Windows, and by the time Bill was offered the opportunity to code something in Windows it was already hopelessly entangled.

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Not exactly. I am a huge fan of code modularization, but what modularization offers you is the ability to decrease the exponent (i.e. to be devTime^1.01 instead of devTime^2). Some features though (including segment tuning, from the sound of it), will touch a ton of other features regardless of how well you modularize your code.

I work at a networking company (Arista), and a lot of the interesting problems come from this sort of interaction. Our entire OS was built so an agent would be resilient to changes in another agent, and this modularization means there is very little "spaghetti code". However, when you are building a feature (say, a new routing protocol), you have to be extremely conscious of how it interacts with everything else: various reliability features (i.e. Stateful switchovers), configuration features (saved configs, public APIs), resource contention (TCAM utilization), etc. etc. If that new routing protocol was the first thing we implemented on our switch, it would be a complete breeze. In the context of other features though, this becomes a more intensive project (though in codebases without proper modularization you'd find this task "herculean" as opposed to "intensive").

pg's whole thesis for lisp was that it reduces the increasing time of modifying larger codebases to o(log n) rather than o(n^k) or o(n) (n being size of codebase)

That is true of immutability languages like Clojure, O don't see how that is possible for a mutable dynamically typed language like CommonLisp

> I am a huge fan of code modularization

These days that's no problem. But back then computers were slower and memory much tighter. Making clean interfaces to integrate things made the code too slow and large.

On the other hand, projects were smaller, so there was less need.

Or maybe not. The modern version of segment tuning is cache friendliness. Also, with modern virtual memory, function layout may be important in order to minimize page faults.

Completely unconnected to the discussion, and excuse the incursion, but your (Aristas) Switches _rock_. Got 8 at work - loving the 10G interfaces.

Thanks, carry on. ;)

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