The price of Some(everything), the value of None

This week, Loic talked about how to measure the value of software, and Reece talked about category theory.

Loic based his talk on an academic study of software value from Gio Wiederhold, published in ACM. He talked about how the value of software changes over time. Typically, revenue from a software product will rise until it reaches a peak, but the price of software is usually not expected to increase significantly over time. Maintenance costs, particular for keeping old versions available, can rise over time. In practice, 5% of code is deleted per year, and a new version of a product consists of less than 30% more code – with most effort spent on keeping everything running smoothly. Loic discussed rational design decisions about where to focus the effort in software development, and making sure there is sufficient investment in maintenance.

Everyone else was generally interested in the topic, but found the research it was based on somewhat dated. It’s very much based on the “large software company producing a big product” model, like sales of MS Office. However, the current market is much more about web delivery of systems that can be updated very frequently in small ways, and about apps, and about Open Source. We discussed how these sales models impacted software value.

Then, Reece talked about category theory, and its relevance to software development – in a talk called “Monads are not (always) Optional”. He talked about the value of using standard mathematical terminology for the concepts of programming, and defined “category”, “object”, and “morphism”. Then we discussed composition of morphisms, and how classes of numbers (e.g. integers, rational numbers, natural numbers, complex numbers) could be transformed into each other via various operations, but other operations (such as addition and multiplication) changed the values of numbers but kept them within the same category. He discussed the relevance to programming, and how category theory and its concepts provided a more unified mechanism for structuring solutions than other approaches such as design patterns.

We then discussed monads, and monads in C# via Linq and in Scala via sequences and optional. We discussed that the “Advanced Scala with Cats” had recently been made available for free, and several people planned to read it. No-one was clear of the difference between Scalaz and Cats – both seem to cover similar ground (some subsequent research seems to show that they’re similar, and Cats might generally be preferred).