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Karsten Schmidt
Karsten Schmidt
@toxi@mastodon.thi.ng  路  activity timestamp 4 weeks ago

Hierarchies 馃槱... One of the biggest recurring time-consuming issues I sometimes encounter is making decisions about _where_ to put some (new or exisiting) code/feature, i.e. in which package, new or existing, considering: functional fit (topic), structural fit (pre-existing data format conventions with the rest of a package), and if possible, not introducing new dependencies as a result of new feature... Sometimes these three aspects are mutually blocking each other and it's so time consuming to figure out a solution...

I've got very similar issues with most other static hierarchies (e.g. directory-based file systems, hierarchical websearch directories etc.) and why I think tag-based systems (with intersection/union/negation ops, not just single categories) are a superior way to organize large collections of knowledge (counting source code here too as a form of encoded knowledge). It's also one of the reasons I've been experimenting with and building tools with completely flat collections/graphs and then use queries & transclusion to assemble/extract/select functionality on demand... Need to prepare some screen recordings to share more of those tools/experiments...

#Hierarchy #Tagging #SoftwareArchitecture

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vga256
vga256
@vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net replied  路  activity timestamp 4 weeks ago

@toxi agreed on all points. i encountered this an unmentionable number of times dealing with class inheritance based programming over the years. i spent half of my time refactoring instead of actually building things. while it鈥檚 a different kind of technical problem - the solution (in my case, multiple prototypal inheritance aka mixins) produces the same kind of outcome as tagging: something can belong to multiple categories without being limited to only those categories

the only loss is, to me, the pleasure of a finely hand-crafted hierarchy. there鈥檚 a certain aesthetic value to it, like a Linnaean system

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