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How to reduce the cognitive load of your code

chrismm.com

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Re: How to reduce the cognitive load of your code

#91

Post by lucaspiller »

igl wrote: post #21

No one ever mentions formatting. I really like aligning multiline blocks, adding whitespace and useless braces here an there. e.g: Having just a single space between function name and arguments makes it look less like a call. Yet almost all lint presets/defaults forbid this. Typography is all about the whitespace between letters forming easily recognizable shapes.

This is one thing I do too, and what really bugged me when I first tried Go. As an example I will align equals signs like this:

    loggedIn = foo
    isAdmin  = bar
It doesn't look like much, but when you are glancing over code it really helps to quickly read it.

Re: How to reduce the cognitive load of your code

#92

Post by CuriouslyC »

zeveb wrote: post #58
lostcolony wrote: post #53

'Avoid using language extensions and libraries that do not play well with your IDE' I'm of the opinion this should be extended to "does not play well without an IDE". Because even in projects that said "everyone, use Eclipse(/IntelliJ/whatever)", and tried to share project files, there was constant pain in ensuring that everyone had the same development environment ("Oh, yeah, I made a local change to my project file…

I agree completely and totally. A good programmer's text editor (e.g. vi or emacs) is far more general than an IDE, more easily extensible and rather more future-proof (folks will still be using emacs & vim in twenty years; will anyone be using Eclipse?). Requiring an IDE is, to my mind, a symptom of a far-too-complex environment which will lead to breakage.

People have been using eclipse for almost 15 years, and if they stop using it, it will be because there is a better IDE (see: IntelliJ). Things like smart auto-complete, click-to-definition, history/diff merge views and integrated build support/dependency management are a huge productivity win.

Re: How to reduce the cognitive load of your code

#93

Post by jauco »

norswap wrote: post #59

Like often with this kind of article it barely scratches the surface. "null != variable" will confuse people is downright silly. People confused by this won't have an inkling of what any non-hello-world program does. The rest has some validity, but it focuses on syntax and programming in the very small. It might take a bit of effort, but I can make sense of a tangled function (that's not an excuse to code sloppily th…

Slightly harder to understand, it is. But incomprehensible, it is not.

Re: How to reduce the cognitive load of your code

#94

Post by lr4444lr »

jimbokun wrote: post #72

"Avoid using language extensions and libraries that do not play well with your IDE. The impact they will have on your productivity will far outweigh the small benefit of easier configuration or saving a few keystrokes with more terse syntax." This is the main reason to avoid Spring. Having so much critical code in XML and properties configuration files, annotations, and magical interfaces that somehow sprout implemen…

Intellij IDEA is remarkably Spring-aware if you set it up properly. Static checks across schema-specified XML and Java is tight. That said, I couldn't imagine working with Spring if I weren't using IDEA.

Re: How to reduce the cognitive load of your code

#95

Post by msluyter »

lostcolony wrote: post #53

'Avoid using language extensions and libraries that do not play well with your IDE' I'm of the opinion this should be extended to "does not play well without an IDE". Because even in projects that said "everyone, use Eclipse(/IntelliJ/whatever)", and tried to share project files, there was constant pain in ensuring that everyone had the same development environment ("Oh, yeah, I made a local change to my project file…

Well, sure, but that's why you don't share project files.

I think that if you do things correctly, your concern is mostly mitigated. My last job was Java/Spring. As someone noted above, you really don't want to be working with Java/Spring without IntelliJ.

But we never had issues with anyone breaking builds due to screwing up project files, because those weren't shared and the project would run/build/test immediately after import into the IDE without any additional tweaks.

I think it's sort of odd that many folks complain about IDEs, but then use vim with a million plugins. Isn't vim + plugins = IDE? Or, if the overall point is "java sucks, don't use java" then fine, but if you have to use it, I couldn't even imagine using plain old vim without any language support...

Re: How to reduce the cognitive load of your code

#96

Post by carussell »

mikekchar wrote: post #81
carussell wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would love to see comments in a side bar This is brilliant. A neat way to bootstrap getting this sort of thing implemented in most code editors would be to write a plugin that can do this for existing code and make it good enough to turn heads. It would extract documentation blocks to be presented as prose in a vertically split pane to the right and present the file itself with those blocks hidden—as if automatic…

There is a tool for literate coffeescript that formats the output in a similar way - you have the english text in a pane on the left and the code in a pane on the right. I quite like the effect -- especially since there are potentially no comments in the code at all, which I often want if I'm just trying to read it quickly. Unfortunately, literate coffeescript is not really mature enough to be used in a large project…

It doesn't really sound like the same thing I'm talking about, to be honest.

And I find the idea of a tool that automatically rewrites machine readable code into a natural language to be of dubious value beyond use cases where someone is first picking up the language. Similar to those tools that exist to generate comments in the form "Set global position" based on a method named setGlobalPosition. It just creates redundancy, and if you're committing the output to your source tree, then it's redundancy in the form of clutter, too.

What I'm thinking of, as I said, should shoot for parity with having a half-screen browser window open to the right containing the relevant docs. Only in this instance the docs are "live", and the lookup process is context-sensitive, requiring very little manual effort to perform it. I know that a basic attempt at something bearing minimal similarity is available in most editors that try to implement Intellisense, but generally I find the helpfulness of the small popup in most implementations to be limited to helping you get the method signature right, and not much else.

One of the nice side effect of the design I'm talking about would be a system that encourages keeping the docs up-to-date and useful as much as it encourage their consumption.

Re: How to reduce the cognitive load of your code

#97

Post by szatkus »

megous wrote: post #55
hyperhopper wrote: post #34

Even the first example is a bit silly. Nobody is going to not understand that (null == foo) is the same as (foo == null).

Also, it can still catch bugs even in javascript. It's not related to C at all, as original article states. Equality operator is commutative (sans operand side effects). It's not a quirk.

It's easier to use tools or IDE.

  $ jshint test.js
  test.js: line 3, col 10, Expected a conditional expression and instead saw an assignment.

  1 error

Re: How to reduce the cognitive load of your code

#98

Post by arcticbull »

reacweb wrote: post #19
naringas wrote: post #11

I used to think that a lot of bad code out there was made by lazy, incompetent programmers... But then, after a certain job, I realized that this is probably not the case. Now I belive that most bad code out thare is made by overworked and tired programmers in a rush to deliver something that works.

Most of the bad code was made by very productive developers.

One of my co-workers likes to say that 10X engineers produce tech debt 10X faster than the average engineer :) Definitely been true in my experience.

Re: How to reduce the cognitive load of your code

#99

Post by JustSomeNobody »

jimbokun wrote: post #72

"Avoid using language extensions and libraries that do not play well with your IDE. The impact they will have on your productivity will far outweigh the small benefit of easier configuration or saving a few keystrokes with more terse syntax." This is the main reason to avoid Spring. Having so much critical code in XML and properties configuration files, annotations, and magical interfaces that somehow sprout implemen…

Because it is much better to let misspellings get caught during run time than compile time. /s

Same with a lot of the DI frameworks that were so popular for a while. New guy doesn't wire something up correctly, checks it in and everyone spends the next 3 hours debugging a rabbit hole. (OK, slight exaggeration.)

Re: How to reduce the cognitive load of your code

#100

Post by JustSomeNobody »

norswap wrote: post #59

Like often with this kind of article it barely scratches the surface. "null != variable" will confuse people is downright silly. People confused by this won't have an inkling of what any non-hello-world program does. The rest has some validity, but it focuses on syntax and programming in the very small. It might take a bit of effort, but I can make sense of a tangled function (that's not an excuse to code sloppily th…

"null != variable" will confuse people is downright silly. People confused by this won't have an inkling of what any non-hello-world program does.

I feel this is one of those things someone new might get confused about the first time they read it. After that, no. IOW, understanding this is part of learning and once it is learned, it is OK.

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