No More Jargon


The coalescence of thoughts with regards to technical subject matters in the areas of software design and computer languages.

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    Monday, December 18, 2006

    Dear Lord, Let Us Express in Code That Which Belongs in Code

    This past semester I took a class called Advanced Systems Analysis and Design and in this class we ostensibly learned all about designing and managing the creation of a technical system from start to finish. I say ostensibly because I feel like I'm worse off now, if what I'm supposed to be able to do is design and manage such a system. Maybe it's my fault though. Maybe I should've started running for the hills when I saw that the course was listed under a MGMT heading in the course catalog.

    Now, to be fair, a few of the management bits in the course made sense and I think they might've conveyed valid information. And if most of the course had been filled with content about that, I'd probably be a happy camper, a little bored, mind you, since it's material I find necessary, but not interesting, but not angry, as I am now.

    No friends, the bulk of this course was about designing these systems. I'm not going to bore you with all the details of what went so god awful horribly wrong. Suffice to say, we were getting a Manager's perspective on System Design; a person who is so far removed from the technical details of a system that they hold no importance and thus has no business submitting design specifications to an engineer. However, there is one element from the course that I must elaborate on, if only for the sheer idiocy of it all: The Base Structural Grammar.

    The first thing you have to know about the Base Structural Grammar is that no one else on the Internet knows jack or shit about it. Google searches for "Base Structure Grammar" and "Base Structural Grammar" turn up one result each. This led myself and the rest of my teammates on the project to conclude that the BSG (as it was called for 6 weeks before the acronym was actually elaborated upon) was either a fancy acronym for Battlestar Galactica or something that the Professor made up on his own, in isolation, and without anyone to tell him just how full of bullshit it was.

    At this point, you might be thinking to yourself, "Oh, I'm sure it wasn't that bad." Well friend, let me tell you just why this was so fucking stupid. It was a formal grammar for the description of control flow within a system that lacked BRANCHING CAPACITY. Okay? Get it. An attempt to describe operations that will be implemented in a Turing Complete programing system, in a language that, itself, is NOT TURING COMPLETE.

    How were different courses of execution handled you might be asking yourself? By rewriting the entire case, but changed to account for the different operations that would need to be called in this case. As a comparison, if you were trying to do this while actually programming, you would need to rewrite all your functions 2^N times for every if statement present in them, and then dispatch to each of these functions based on the values of the arguments (which you have to magically express the conditions of, because there's no way to describe it in code).

    When he explained this, I wanted to curb stomp his fat head. If I had been in the same room, I would've become physically violent. Luckily, I guess, I was watching the lecture remotely. I think I banged my head against my desk for about 10 minutes, but my memory is a little fuzzy from them.

    Why, why, why, why couldn't a programming language be used for that? Something like a pared down Scheme would be perfect for those sorts of expressions! And then the code could actually be USED (if it, in fact, worked) after the lower level operations were implemented. Heck, you could actually get a jump start on that if a half-decent testing system existed for this theoretical design language!

    I dunno, the mind boggles.

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