Dahl (Node.Js), Sussman (Scheme) and the Scientific Method

Everything started with Dahl's post "I hate almost all software" (probably not Node.js). I basically agree with the second sentence and the last one (that is to say "The only thing that matters in software is the experience of the user" and "It's unnecessary and complicated at almost every layer"). Other stuff is just a list of obvious thing: when systems evolve and nobody cuts broken parts out, then systems become complicated.

In fact, this is almost a built-in feature: for years our answer to complexity was "add another layer". Which led to the "abstraction leaks" Martelli talked about in some conferences and the obvious fact that the layer we just hid did not became any simpler. We just put the dirt under the carpet. Needles to say, the new layer becomes as complex as the old one in a few years/months/days.

So what? I would also point out another apparently unrelated event. In 2009, Sussman explained why at MIT Python substituted Scheme in basic programming courses. And we all know how wonderful is SICP; still the authors themselves started thinkng about changing the course since 1995. Essentially the reason is that "engineering in 1980 was not what it was in the mid-90s or in 2000. In 1980, good programmers spent a lot of time thinking, and then produced spare code that they thought should work. Code ran close to the metal, even Scheme — it was understandable all the way down. [...] 6.001 had been conceived to teach engineers how to take small parts that they understood entirely and use simple techniques to compose them into larger things that do what you want.

But programming now isn’t so much like that. Nowadays you muck around with incomprehensible or nonexistent man pages for software you don’t know who wrote. You have to do basic science on your libraries to see how they work, trying out different inputs and seeing how the code reacts. This is a fundamentally different job, and it needed a different course."

Isn't that they are basically saying the very same thing about today software world? I think so. Software is so complicated that we ought to use experimental techniques to dig into it.

The part that Dahl lives out is that Node.js is not any simpler (I will elaborate on that in another moment). In fact Javascript itself suffers all the problems described of being unnecessarily complex (to me lack of orthogonality and regularity is a form of complexity of the worse kind -- and it is also the very critique I move to languages I love, like Clojure). Adding a nice asynchronous layer on the top of a messy language is only going to create an asynchronous messy language. Nothing more, nothing less. But hey, V8 is fast.