Talk:Big ball of mud

Quote

Here is quote — supposedly from Joel Moses — that is bouncing around the internet:

APL is like a diamond. It has a beautiful crystal structure; all of its parts are related in a uniform and elegant way. But if you try to extend this structure in any way - even by adding another diamond - you get an ugly kludge. LISP, on the other hand, is like a ball of mud. You can add any amount of mud to it and it still looks like a ball of mud. -— Joel Moses?, 1978?

Can somebody provide a reference for this quote? -- Tobias Bergemann 10:18, 7 September 2005 (UTC)

A Web search turned up http://people.bath.ac.uk/masjap/TYL/history.html which I will just note for future use (or not). This seems to be part of Julian Padget's papers, circa 1994. --Charles Gaudette (talk) 20:51, 25 January 2008 (UTC)

How is this different from spaghetti code?

70.109.180.126 (talk) 01:27, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

This article describes entire computer systems that lack proper design/architecture. Spaghetti code (while it can include entire systems) usually refers to actual blocks of source code, that are incoherent, hard to maintain and hard to read. The two articles are related, but I see it as a macro vs. micro problem when looking at a system (with this article being the macro). I'll add spaghetti to the related links, good catch. TheTraveler3 (talk) 18:43, 16 May 2010 (UTC)

Not article material

This is not article material. "Big ball of mud" is just a metaphor used by Yoder and by Moses -- in different ways -- to describe systems. Do we have any evidence of notability -- that is, of widespread use by other authors in some more-or-less precise sense? --Macrakis (talk) 20:34, 20 December 2014 (UTC)

But “Metaphor Matters.”

“The ‘Big Ball Of Mud’ has turned out to be, God help us, our best known work.” - Brian Foote, Google Tech Talks, August 28, 2007

After almost 20 years, BBOM seems to be a metaphor that has been widely adopted, but how does one measure relevance of BBOM for WP purposes? I really don’t have the qualifications to say, here, but I think BBOM is defensible. It seems to me to be a widely referenced term, at least in software engineering blogs.

Here, “Big Ball of Mud” author Brian Foote speaks incessantly in metaphors; he begins and ends with metaphor. “We need metaphor.” It reminded of me the “Metaphor Movement” I briefly read about just before I got into software engineering.

Scaring up blogs that use the term with on-line search is as easy as scaring up English-folk with a tripod, but I don’t know if that is good enough. Is it?

Here, the term is used comfortably without attribution (2013).

I think one could easily patch this article’s citation problems by citing the original paper, but that would highlight a problem with the present article; it could then be tagged as referencing a single source. I imagine that sufficient published analyses of Foote and Yoder could be found to fix the article’s citation problems. IveGoneAway (talk) 14:20, 15 January 2015 (UTC)

The Streaming Specification model

Regarding this:

"Another cause of "big ball of mud" software is when managers put pressure on developers and ask them to write the system's code one part at a time and come with incremental micro requirements instead of providing a clear description of the problem to be solved"

When on a project like that a few years ago, I started calling it the "Streaming Specification" model. It did not work well, but program management said the project's requirements were too complex for them to be able to write down or articulate all at once.