A Philosophy of Software Design

I've been re-reading 1Q84 by Murakami. It left a very light and magical impression on me in high school, but I couldn't remember much at all of it anymore so decided to pick it up again and dust it off. I'm also trying to transition into software development and have been watching John Ousterhout's talks and just yesterday started reading "A Philosophy of Software Design" - enjoying it so far.

A philosophy of software design by John Ousterhout is the best software book I have read. But, from your post it’s not clear specifically what you are looking for. If you think you will level up by learning how to apply numerical modelling techniques, then it’s probably best to focus on that.

- Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout - Leviathan Wakes by James Corey - UNIX: A History and a Memoir by Brian Kernighan - Efficient Linux at the Command Line by Daniel Barrett

John Ousterhout's "A Philosophy of Software Design" I liked. It was supposed to be assigned reading for Berkeley's data structures class CS61B, and I don't think I really internalized the lessons within, but after re-reading it recently, I appreciated it a lot more and found the material transcends how to write code but also how to architect things as well.

A Philosophy of Software Design - John Ousterhout

I read A philosophy of.. and I might as well be reading Philosophy because I didn't understand what the book was saying

I’ll have two recommendations. 1. A Philosophy of Software Design is very good. Not the whole of it but it’s short and to the point. 2. Fiction, as diverse as possible. I apologise for making assumptions but many software engineers are secretly lacking in understanding other people, what kind of of life experiences that have, how they think about the world, what is important for them. If you work with people it is going to be useful. Also, it’ll enrich your life and you’ll have more to talk about during coffee breaks :)

"A Philosophy of Software Design" by Stanford's John Ousterhout is excellent. It is quite concise (about 190 pages), but in my opinion, it includes all the essential information that the other books in that category would teach you. It leaves out a lot of cruft that over the years turned out to be non-issues (code styling, problems that come with object oriented programming, etc.) but occasionally - when the topic is popular and widespread (e.g. Uncle Bob advice) - addresses them as alternative opinions. It was first published in 2018 and is therefore not in the out-of-date category. So I would recommend it as essential read, hands down. If you want something a bit more elaborate: "The Pragmatic Programmer" has a 20th Anniversary Edition. It is a timeless classic, worth reading at any rate. That being said, I wish there was a single consistent resource[1] that summarizes truly modern software design philosophy in the sense that it leaves the object orientation inspired ideas behind that did not turn out to be useful and focusses on typed functional programming. Maybe with examples in Typescript and Rust.…

The top book imho is The Pragmatic Programer. Here some other recomendations - Designing Data-Intensive Applications - Tidy First?: A Personal Exercise in Empirical Software Design - A Philosophy of Software Design - Refactoring UI - The Software Engineer's Guidebook - https://blog.rstankov.com/programing-books/

2 books I consider excellent: - A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout - Domain-driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software by Eric Evans They both manage to explain some ideas that are really important, in a very simple way (which makes me feel like an idiot).

To people who are experienced in writing out the full interface of modules, ie their assumptions and guarantees, it's quite clear that being a "deep module" in Ousterhout's sense is quite rare and often undesirable, and that Ousterhout's examples of deep modules are actually shallow. See https://www.pathsensitive.com/2018/10/book-review-philosophy... (https://www.pathsensitive.com/2018/10/book-review-philosophy-of-software.html?m=1) He gets a lot of other stuff right though. Love his writing on comments

Most so the book is meant to be taken as a rule of thumb. I personally think simple interface hiding deep functionality is a really good one. I was looking at the langchain codebase last year after having read the book and the point was struck home. Many of the functions in Langchain are one line wrappers of other functions. I try to think of functions as atomic units of knowledge. Very short functions are a good indicator that you're not organizing that knowledge effectively. When you have a simple interface with deep logic, you're encapsulating logic in a single place. This is very good for reducing the cognitive load of a developer. Shallow functions fragment that knowledge across multiple classes/functions/files. The developer needs to hold more of the world in their head to make sense of things. This increases complexity.…

His idea to keep interfaces small and powerful bothered me - I don’t think it expresses any truth about programming despite being a good rule of thumb. I kept feeling frustrated while reading. The lambda calculus has the best interface to functionality ratio possible but you don’t see humans using it to program. This objection led me to the conclusion that a better heuristic would be: programs should try to communicate intent primarily to another reader, and then to the computer. He does touch on this a little by saying aim for ease of reading over ease of writing, but I don’t think it was a main point. I agreed with almost everything else he had to say including the “taking it too far” chapter (I don’t actually think we should be using lambda calculus to program lol). Curious to know which parts you disagreed with. I am only 2yoe

I can recommend a Philosophy of Software Design Paperback by John Ousterhout. I've been programming for 15 years and it closely parallels my own current beliefs about programming. He stands above the lower aspects of programming/code/modules, raising the discussion to a conceptual level, that you seem to be wanting. I think there were only 2 areas out of approximately 10 that I thought I had a few better ideas but a)He may have simplifying it to more easily allow explanation. b) His explanations are much better than mine and if I tried to explain it, maybe I'd fail.

For software engineering, I recommend A Philosophy of Software Design. It has principles that I think translate well to other engineering fields. For engineering in general: To Engineer is Human - Henry Petroski The Art of Doing Science and Engineering - Richard Hamming Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down - J.E. Gordon

A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout. The principles / approaches (e.g. problem disaggregation) apply to other engineering disciplines.

A Philosophy of Software Design https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/book.php Righting Software https://rightingsoftware.org/

A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout is good reading

I recommend reading A Philosophy of Software Design. Gets into some fundamental principles of writing software without getting too prescriptive. A part of the book covers balancing the cost of abstraction with the amount of complexity it is hiding. The ideal is: simple interface (DSL in this context) and lot of hidden complexity. I agree with your point, but the threshold for writing a DSL needs to be carefully considered.

Funny :) . I remember a comment "The next line is empty to improve readability". With all that, John Ousterhout is a very knowledgeable person, so maybe the book deserves some close look.

Fair enough. I was also a bit underwhelmed after all the hype it had received here and in a couple other places. I still thought it was a worthwhile read and will probably include it in a list of books I'd recommend to a mentee in the future. I guess my second reading of it will either confirm that for me or get it moved off that list.

Code Complete Software Design For Flexibility A Philosophy of Software Design

Second A Philosophy of Software Design it's a very good book.

The Psychology of Computer Programming by Gerald Weinberg. Some dated language (which he calls out himself in the 25th anniversary edition), but overall very good. A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout, short book, quick read. I'll be rereading it once I figure out which bookshelf my wife hid it on (she doesn't like my bookstack approach to "organizing" and moved many things to shelves while I wasn't paying attention).

A philosophy of software design - John Ousterhout This has an interesting generic discussion of API design which is technology agnostic.

I think that would be better off in a different book rather than as a part of this book. It is better to provide a clear and memorable picture that is only slightly wrong than a hedging and muddled picture that is still slightly wrong.

This book brilliantly illuminates the deepest issues at the core of software development. It is a well-written, gentle read. I have been programming for close to 50 years now, and this is probably the best and most insightful book I have ever read on software development. Its deceptive simplicity is such that a first-year programmer would benefit from it. Read it once per decade! You will get more out of it each time as you mature as a developer.

I came here to recommend this one, very digestible and has had a significant impact on the quality of the software I write.

I came into this thread hoping to find the suggestion near the top. Beyond his credibility as the creator of Tcl, in the talk he gave at Google about the book [1] he describes the course he teaches that was the inspiration for the book. The course is to write a word processor with a team and extended it with features over the semester, swapping codebases between teams so occasionally you have to work with other's code. Essentially the largest possible code project you can fit in one semester. Along the way, Ousterhout will give a deep code review of the each project. I think it must be very insightful to see the same project implemented so many ways, and to see what works in terms of simplicity and extensibility. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmSAYlu0NcY

An absolute must have I agree, amazing book.

This is a great book. Highly recommended for inclusion in a “thin” bookshelf.

A Philosophy of Software Design. Very well-written. At 190 pages, quite likely finish-able in a weekend. But if you get 70% of the way through it, that is still very valuable. It makes sense as an underlying set of principles that explain why you would use design patterns.