141–150 of 188 posts
This is a bit western centric maybe, because I see Chinese developers reading tons of code, to the point that I receive an incredible amount of Redis PRs about conceptual bugs that can never happen in practice, since some Chinese developer is reading the code and doing the math in her/his head.
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This is a normal feeling. But one weakness of this approach for javascript is that it's easier to become popular because you have a much larger base of developers.
That makes sense. I use Python the for most part. I feel like I have seen this happen with old libraries where they used to be very popular and maintained then became abandoned a few years ago.
Personally, I would rather see this than a bug fix being committed every week. That makes me question how many more bugs there are and how much I'm going to have to babysit updating the dependency.
One of the things that sets a good programmer apart is the willingness to fearlessly dig into someone else's code. I've heard it said before that you're responsible for every line of code you ship to your users. It follows that you shouldn't treat your dependencies as black boxes. Getting a stack trace that's 3 or 4 levels deep in Django/React/ ? Dig under the covers and understand what's happening. Include that info…
> willingness to fearlessly dig into someone else's code. That's kinda illusion. If you start digging into some really complex code, like distributed processing core, meta-programming framework, low-level optimizations, it can take you years to understand all that is going on. Often it's more economical just to rewrite it, even if the previous system was far better than what you'll produce. Whether companies like it…
* Getting the solution 80% of the way there is often pretty fast (which ends up deceiving everyone depending on it "it's almost done!")
* You are nearly guaranteed to encounter a bunch of bugs that were already solved in the original dependency.
* Due to the previous points, there's a big chance that your initial design had a few fatal flaws, and requires significant refactoring to address (making the project take longer, and if not careful making it much harder to understand & maintain)
Rewriting dependencies can definitely be worth it from a code ownership/maintenance point of view; but more often than not, you'll end up creating a cycle where the new version of the dependency is just as obtuse as the previous—and once you leave, the same problem all over again.
If a dependency is well documented, has a clear architecture, and follows consistent coding practices, it will stand the test of time (including loss of authors/maintainers). Most people/companies aren't willing to put the time/effort into that level of polish.
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Pragmatism wins the day, for sure. I'll happily read someone else's code (e.g., an open-source GitHub repository I rely on) if it's necessary to troubleshoot issues or implement a feature. There needs to be a reason (i.e., motivation) to read code.
On github and the node/JS ecosystem, the way this will play out: 1. Spend hours digging through layers and layers of crufty JS. 2. Find the issue (and the package responsible for the issue). 3. Find out there is a Github Issue for the issue. 4. Find out there is a pull request for the issue. 5. Find out the pull request is sitting in position #35 of #128 pull requests going back to 2015. 6. Go binge drinking.
One idea was taking a popular open source tool with a good test suite and trying to get the tests to pass, but I think checking code out at a point before a new feature is implemented and reimplementing it could end up being really interesting. Could even make it more interactive by sharing the checkout point so viewers can do an implementation themselves and doing a stream walking through different interesting implementations.
One of the things that sets a good programmer apart is the willingness to fearlessly dig into someone else's code. I've heard it said before that you're responsible for every line of code you ship to your users. It follows that you shouldn't treat your dependencies as black boxes. Getting a stack trace that's 3 or 4 levels deep in Django/React/ ? Dig under the covers and understand what's happening. Include that info…
In my experience, never happens on permissively licensed projects. "Contribute time and code to open source on company time? Are you mad? Fork it and keep that as our competitive advantage!" Nevermind how dumb this approach actually is, it's what management thinks. "GPL? Oh, we have to? Oh, well, I guess if we have to."
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> ... willingness to fearlessly dig into someone else's code. I've done this many times. The problem is that it takes a lot of time, and there's no way you can dig through more than a fraction of a large codebase. You gotta pick your battles.
Pragmatism wins the day, for sure. I'll happily read someone else's code (e.g., an open-source GitHub repository I rely on) if it's necessary to troubleshoot issues or implement a feature. There needs to be a reason (i.e., motivation) to read code.
Setting aside the "for fun", of course I read my co-workers' code, but also I read my dependencies' code quite often. In particular when you have something that is meant to be extended, the docs never completely cover all the use cases, and the quickest way can be to start reading.
Some examples from my own recent work are reading code from the Ruby gems devise, devise_token_auth, and spree, and also reading Django class-based views (all things meant to be extended). One trick I've learned in Ruby is `cd $(bundle show spree_core)`. From there you can grep, find, read, even add your own `puts` or whatever.
Actually I have been reading some code for fun: Postgres! I have an extension that adds temporal foreign keys, and I'm slowing porting it from plpgsql to C. Reading the code for standard foreign keys is very helpful. Same thing for a lot of other extensions I've written in the last few years. It has helped me a ton to read others' extensions and the core code.
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What frustrates me about the JS world is that all too often, what you get from NPM is the output, not the input. Maven might not be universally loved, but you do at least get to navigate through the original Java source and stand _some_ chance of finding what you're looking for.
I don't follow, the code in node_modules is readable and allows to navigate through the original sources. Is it not always the case?
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It's not really so much that _git_ is lacking the functionality -- it's actually much more possible to do reasonable vendoring with git than with (say) subversion, as you can use submodules to point at your fork. To my mind the issue is more with tooling: you don't typically want to vendor your code, most of the time you want to use a published module. And the process for publishing your fork is too complex to be wor…
I understand there are workarounds, but they are just that. I mean, for example, I'm working away but hit a bug in a dependency. Now i have to fork, submodule, etc. I'm not expecting frictionless per se. But it just feels like there's more overhead than there needs to be. Also, it's possible (in rare cases) the vendor folder is not .gitignore'd. Now what? Submodules is out. Again, given the nature of most modern dev…
a) Make changes in the minified source to understand the problem, then go make changes in the original; or:
b) git clone dependency.git
cd dependency
yarn
yarn link
cd project
yarn link dependency
make changes in dependency
yarn run build
test my app
repeat until fixed
clean up, commit, and PR
I prefer B, but I'll do A first if the build step is annoying or slow.