[p4wnc6]

This is a mess of an essay and does little to persuade me that allowing domain experts to have free reign to make software messes is in any way a good idea.

One of the criticisms applied to software engineers -- the one about bad abstractions like "DriverController" and "ControllerManager" etc. -- is a huge pet peeve of mine because it's basically a manifestation of Conway's Law [0]. It indicates that the communication channels of the organization are problematically ill-suited for the type of system that is needed. The organization won't be able to design it right because it is constrained by its own internal communication hierarchy, and so everyone is thinking in terms of "Handlers" and "Managers" and pieces of code literally end up becoming reflections of the specific humans and committees to which certain deliverables are due for judgement. This is not a problem regarding best practices at all -- it's a sociological problem with the way companies manage developers.

Domain specific programmers aren't immune to this either. You'll get things like "ModelFactory" and "FactoryManager" and "EquationObject" or "OptimizerHandler" or whatever. It's precisely the same problem, except that the manager sitting above the domain-specific programmers is some diehard quadratic programming PhD from the 70s who made a name by solving some crazy finite element physics problem using solely FORTRAN or pure C, and so that defines the communication hierarchy that the domain scientists are embedded in, and hence defines the possible design space their minds can gravitate towards.

There is definitely a risk on the software development side of over-engineering -- I think this is what the essay is getting at with the cheeky comments about too much abstraction or too much tricky run-time dispatching or dynamic behavior. But this is part of the learning path for crafting good code. You go through a period when everything you do balloons in scope because you are a sweaty hot mess of stereotyped design ideas, and then slowly you learn how only one or two things are needed at a time, how it's just as much about what to leave out as what to put in. The domain programmers who are given free reign to be terrible and are never made to wear the programming equivalent of orthopedic shoes to fix their bad patterns will never go through that phase and never get any better.

[0] < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law >