Sometimes in software design we get this idea, “We’ll make this a rule engine. Then the business can write the rules, and they’ll be able to change them without changing the code. That’ll make it more flexible.”
🤣
The rules are code; they change the behavior of the system. Rules interact in ways that are hard to anticipate. It’s harder to write rules than to write code.
It seems like we make business decisions in terms of rules, because we talk about them that way.
People make uncomplicated decisions by rule. We make complicated decisions by aesthetic (from expertise), and these are difficult or impossible to express in rules.
Real-life rules often contradict each other. A human with a feeling for the situation can prioritize among them.
For instance, “How do you position a picture in a column of text?” Back in the day, people laid out the newspaper pages, and they positioned them using some rules and also their eyes. How does a browser do it? Careful people have created nine precise rules for positioning float elements. Excerpt:
4. A floating box’s outer top may not be higher than the top of its containing block. When the float occurs between two collapsing margins, the float is positioned as if it had an otherwise empty anonymous block parent taking part in the flow. The position of such a parent is defined by the rules in the section on margin collapsing.
you don’t need to actually read this
If you think “Rules are declarative, they’re easier to reason about than imperative code” then go format a complicated web site with CSS. Make changes in the hundreds of lines of CSS, and see if you can predict the results. Now see if you can predict the results of changing someone else’s CSS.
Writing rules is hard. Designing a syntax and semantics that let people write rules to cover all the cases in the world, even harder. Do you really want to embark on that? Is it really more effective than changing some code when the business wants change?
As humans, we make aesthetic judgements for complicated decisions. This is one of our superpowers. Putting those judgements into rules is never easy; don’t pretend it is. And no, you don’t need to implement a rule engine.
Thanks to @nokusu for teaching me about floats and margins and other layout fun.