Viewing profile — johnmwilkinson

I completely agree. I wrote a book on the subject of how to write clear code (Bob Martin was off by one letter!) and comments are a key element of that. https://elementsofcode.io/c…

It’s not that people don’t write like this, it’s the over-usage and general tone.

In what sense is this true? We understand the theory of what is happening and we can painstakingly walk through the token generation process and understand it. So in what sense do …

Expanding on this regarding the difference between abstraction vs encapsulation: abstraction is about the distillation of useful concepts while encapsulation is a specific tactic u…

Computer Science stole the term abstraction from the field of Mathematics. I think mathematics can be really helpful in clearing things up here. A really simple abstraction in math…

Sort of related? https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login-logout_1305_micken...

I believe this is conflating abstraction with encapsulation. The former is about semantic levels, the later about information hiding.

A peak of 4k/s does not mean they get that for the entire hour. The point I was trying to make is that simply computing the mean over a 24hr period will almost certainly ensure you…

Of course, they make 90% of requests between 6 and 7 PM, with a general peak of 4 thousand req/s.

Broad strokes: absolutely. The practical reality gets tricky, though. All programming abstractions are imperfect in some regard, so the question becomes what level of imperfection …

> 4. Clarity is seniority. Cleverness is overhead. Clarity is likely the most important aspect of making maintainable, extendable code. Of course, it’s easy to say that, it’s harde…

I think clever is being used in two different ways, in that case. In the original quote, “clever” refers to the syntax, where they way the code was constructed makes it difficult t…

I recently published a book about coding, and put it all online for free: https://elementsofcode.io I suppose it has moved from “what are you working” to “what have you worked on” …

Hey HN! I wrote a book on programming called The Elements of Code. I put the entire book online here: https://elementsofcode.io/ When mentoring (usually new) programmers, I noticed…

Fun, but terrible on mobile

> She insisted, “My dream is to build housing only for women who plan to never marry.” Sounds a lot like a convent

Personally, I am a big believer in doing one thing really well rather than a lot of things kinda ok. I can't speak to how easy it is to use nexus for managing npm packages, but I c…

Not that we don't enjoy donations, but this project won't go the way of Sinopia. Trent and I originally forked Sinopia and purposefully made it an organization rather than putting …