Whether all of this is academic or not, I don't know. But what I do know is that these ideas and their practical implications have an ENORMOUS impact on the practitioner's and business's productivity.
> in a very real sense disdain for dependency is something I worry can prevent a project from going through an important high-energy transitory period where semi-formed dependencies exist to solve concrete tasks but have not yet annealed into a final, low-energy form.
We must always riff and hack and creatively explore our domains in code -- this is another practice of the software professional, and notions of "architectural soundness" and "dependency reduction" should never paralyze us from creative play, sculpting and exploration. In these modes of development its best we "turn off" all the rules and let ourselves fly.
But for a code base that has to survive longer than 6 months and that will have more than one collaborator -- this is where it becomes essential to maintain architectural soundness in the shared branch. (My development branches, on the other hand, are in wild violation of all sorts of "rules" -- so there is a difference between what gets promoted to production code and all the exploratory stuff we should also be doing.)
I think the idea of exploratory work is very similar to what I mention going on in small scopes, but I think this evolution occurs at large scales, too. All the development branch isolation in the world can't and shouldn't stop this sort of broad scale evolution.
Whether all of this is academic or not, I don't know. But what I do know is that these ideas and their practical implications have an ENORMOUS impact on the practitioner's and business's productivity.
> in a very real sense disdain for dependency is something I worry can prevent a project from going through an important high-energy transitory period where semi-formed dependencies exist to solve concrete tasks but have not yet annealed into a final, low-energy form.
We must always riff and hack and creatively explore our domains in code -- this is another practice of the software professional, and notions of "architectural soundness" and "dependency reduction" should never paralyze us from creative play, sculpting and exploration. In these modes of development its best we "turn off" all the rules and let ourselves fly.
But for a code base that has to survive longer than 6 months and that will have more than one collaborator -- this is where it becomes essential to maintain architectural soundness in the shared branch. (My development branches, on the other hand, are in wild violation of all sorts of "rules" -- so there is a difference between what gets promoted to production code and all the exploratory stuff we should also be doing.)