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Chuck Moore, Extreme Programmer

cs.uni.edu

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Re: Chuck Moore, Extreme Programmer

#111

Post by netten »

ham_burgers wrote: post #81
wyattk wrote: post #9

I want to take a moment to reflect on what a great community HN has. It never ceases to amaze me. The link is from the CS department at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls, IA. It sounds obscure, but that's my hometown. I grew up a couple blocks away from it. I sat in on classes there. I even know the author's family. That's small town Iowa, for ya. I never thought I would see anything related to that on h…

I work in the fast food industry, don't code, and I'm not even particularly interested in tech, but spend hours reading the articles and comments here.

I was a network engineer and would do the same, can't place the exact reason why, but today i am a python programmer doing network automation. I do think HN had a major part to play in this change

Re: Chuck Moore, Extreme Programmer

#114

Post by Frondo »

jacquesm wrote: post #30
Cyph0n wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TL;DR Not really as impressive as it was made out to be.

You're entirely missing the point made by Chuck Moore and by extension probably don't understand why his way of looking at programming and the Forth language in particular are a big deal even this long after their invention. This kind of minimalism and stripping things down to their essence is a powerful tool to allow you to focus on what matters rather than at all those things that don't really matter. If you don't…

Aren't a lot of us already doing what matters, but just not articulating it the same way?

I collaborate on a team, so we use one documentation standard and one coding style. We've stripped down our coding and commenting styles to the bare essential--one style that works across the whole team, across the lifespan of the project.

The business that pays our team pays for what customers want. Every once in a while a new guy on the team will write something no one wanted, and we end up chucking it. We're stripping down the project code to the bare essentials necessary to make money.

I think what Chuck Moore brings is not so much a plain ol' minimalism, but a nostalgia for a wild west "one man in a garage" tech scene that never really existed, at least not the way we like to imagine it did, because we live in a world driven as much by money as by love of cool new things.

Not to say he doesn't do cool things, but I could do cool things if I didn't have to answer to business constraints, my fellow team members, and so on.

Re: Chuck Moore, Extreme Programmer

#115

Post by flukus »

virmundi wrote: post #107
HumanDrivenDev wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a degree of skepticism is required with NIH. I'm probably not going to roll my own crypto, or high performance statistical routines. But if something invented elsewhere "solves" a problem that really isn't rocket science, or if it's a framework - I will almost always avoid it.

out of curiosity, did you roll your own logging framework? When I read that point, logging came to mind. Should I use SLF4J, or simply print to out?

That's a wheel I have reinvented to good effect. Most logging libraries are quite dumb, if you set your threshold to info you get way to much information, if you set your threshold to exception you lose to much information from before the exception was thrown. Different messages from different threads are all mixed together, etc.

My app specific logger is aware of the context it is running in, it will store all the context but only write it on an exception or error and discard it otherwise, so I get all the information I need without the noise from the 99.9% of the time I don't need it.

I do use logging libraries, but they are for the low level stuff like file truncation, rollover, etc and I wish there were "logging" libraries that did just those tricky little parts on let me write the 50 or so LOC that the high level interface needs.

Re: Chuck Moore, Extreme Programmer

#116

Post by __33__ »

HumanDrivenDev wrote: post #69
feelin_googley wrote: post #16

The "Do Not Speculate!" idea reminds me of the practice of delivering "the kitchen sink" when only a small program that does one thing would suffice. It reminds me of when, e.g., a 1990s-2000s Windows user needed a small program that does one thing, and in order to get it, the download from Microsoft was an installer with hundreds of megabytes of unneeded binary files. It was not possible to download only the single…

> It reminds me of this quote: "The problem with object-oriented languages is they've got all this implicit environment that they carry around with them. You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle." - Joe Armstrong What Joe Armstrong (who I admire) complains about is actually what I love about OO languages. And for me that's the true essence of what OO is, and how it d…

For me your last sentence is not an argument why OO is "more powerfull and better". The banana can be peeled very well by anyone or anything with an opposable thumb (a function). No need to limit yourself to a gorilla (an object).

Re: Chuck Moore, Extreme Programmer

#117

Post by astrobe_ »

feelin_googley wrote: post #16

The "Do Not Speculate!" idea reminds me of the practice of delivering "the kitchen sink" when only a small program that does one thing would suffice. It reminds me of when, e.g., a 1990s-2000s Windows user needed a small program that does one thing, and in order to get it, the download from Microsoft was an installer with hundreds of megabytes of unneeded binary files. It was not possible to download only the single…

"Do not speculate" or YAGNI is really difficult to do past a certain point. You have to vanquish your own FUD one piece at a time. Nobody really does that unless they are really forced to.

Ignore the occasional statements in forum threads about how Forth is so powerful.

Forth is not powerful. It is ugly, stupid and mean.

Because of this, you simplify, simplify and simplify again, up to the project's specs if you can.

Re: Chuck Moore, Extreme Programmer

#118

Post by posterboy »

woodrowbarlow wrote: post #72
com2kid wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It reminds me of when, e.g., a 1990s-2000s Windows user needed a small program that does one thing, and in order to get it, the download from Microsoft was an installer with hundreds of megabytes of unneeded binary files. It was not possible to download only the single program, which was no more than 1-2MB in size. That might have been more to do with how hard publishing code to the web was back then, an internal p…

i don't buy it. dpkg was released in 1994, and that was designed to tame the nest of people passing around small executables on the internet.

designed to facilitate, rather

Re: Chuck Moore, Extreme Programmer

#119

Post by patrickg_zill »

buckminster wrote: post #67
Nokinside wrote: post #45

If our technological civilization collapses and we need to recreate it from scratch, Chuck Moore could do significant part of that.

Off topic, but we can't. All the readily available sources of energy have been used. As someone else said, this is literally the last great civilization. Best not screw it up!

I haven't been on line much these last few days. Did we max out the Sun?

Re: Chuck Moore, Extreme Programmer

#120

Post by hdhzy »

throwaway7645 wrote: post #89
feelin_googley wrote: post #16

The "Do Not Speculate!" idea reminds me of the practice of delivering "the kitchen sink" when only a small program that does one thing would suffice. It reminds me of when, e.g., a 1990s-2000s Windows user needed a small program that does one thing, and in order to get it, the download from Microsoft was an installer with hundreds of megabytes of unneeded binary files. It was not possible to download only the single…

This is what I like about Rebol & Red...pity Rebol didn't catch on more. The full Rebol download is a single executable (no real install) and can build GUIs, and so much more in a very small amount of code.

Not to mention Red can cross compile for multiple OSes and the parse dialect that is basically generalized, readable regular expressions.

My personal theory why Rebol/Red didn't succeed in the mainstream is steep learning curve, it's hard to discover how to do things if you haven't already done some substantial programming work in it. While built-in help is good you need to know what you're looking for. (Delphi had better help in this matter, with examples etc.).

By the way I wonder why Pecan's post is [dead], it doesn't seem to be violating any rule.

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