What do those pie charts show (e.g. Disqus vs Custom)? No idea how to read those.
Oh it's the size of the code in thousands of kilobytes?
Minimalism – An undervalued development skill
111–120 of 179 posts
Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill
#112This reminded me of the Twain quote: "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead." Sometimes I don't know how to solve my problems with tiny amounts of code. It often takes skill and effort to come up with an elegant solution. But I agree it is something we should try to do when we can.
> the Twain quote: "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead."
Friendly amendment: This has been attributed as being originally from Blaise Pascal in 1656 [0]
Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill
#113The most important kind of minimalism in my mind is YAGNI. Every single time I coded something I didn't need yet; I never did, at least not the solution I came up with. And once the complexity is in there, it's very difficult to scale back. This applies to everything I've worked on, from personal projects up to 10KLOC to 3MLOC commercial systems. It's just never a good idea from my experience. The code [0] I write th…
YAGNI conspires against me.
When I spend a lot of time building potential future features or creating a bunch of abstractions, I pretty much always never end up using any of them and it ends up as a (potentially huge) waste of time.
When I'm building something and thinking about whether or not to make it more abstract / support potential future features, and decide "nah, ain't gonna need it", inevitably within a week or month I get some feature requests for those exact things, often requiring me to do a lot of rewriting from the ground up which I wouldn't have otherwise needed to do if I had started off with a more abstract model or added those features when I was initially considering them.
(Obviously this isn't literally always true, and I'm getting better at it over time, but those are the ones that stick out.)
Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill
#114I have super mixed feelings on this. Minimalism makes for a clean, easy to understand codebase, that avoids some of the performance pitfalls associated with bigness. But sometimes it’s easy to build 80% of what you need, and then massively difficult to get to 100%, and the ease of getting to 80% can lead you astray. For instance, I can write a pretty fast matrix multiplication algorithm in maybe a few dozen lines of…
Why not use APL for matrix multiplication Minimalism without sacrafice in performance Look at kx.com, shakti.com
Do not use APL if your main requirement is fast matrix multiplication. I implement Dyalog APL—our matrix multiply is not as good as typical BLAS implementations and I think this is also true of other APLs (most currently maintained APLs are not performance-focused).
J replaced their matrix multiply with a good BLAS-based implementation a few years ago but only supports double-precision floats and tends to be slower than Dyalog for other operations. I don't know about K's performance.
Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill
#115Kinda anecdotal, but I've been working on OSS libraries for the last few years and what I've learned is very similar: 80% of the features aren't used by anyone, and if someone really wants something they just open an issue.
Yeah, same experience here.
I tend to be very stubborn about adding features to libraries, though. A handful of times I got pull requests that almost duplicated the size of small libraries just to cover some weird corner cases. One was support for an ORM discontinued since 2012. Another was someone who wanted a build tool to inline their assets during development phase. After asking, most people admitted that they don't really need the feature, but were simply trying to make the app complete.
Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had to go look up Ginkgo... and I'm not sure it's an Apples to Apples comparison. The built-in Go framework for unit testing is great but I don't think I would want to try to write clean BDD tests with it. Part of the value-prop for Ginkgo is that it gives you a standard BDD DSL which if you're doing BDD is half the battle... describing and testing the behavior with a human-friendly programmatic interface. On the o…
Which, IMHO, would behoove the team to learn BDD conceptually, in order to assess its appropriateness as a tool in any situation.
I’m yet to see BDD used even though I’ve seen BDD frameworks used a lot. BDD frameworks happen to be excellent for unit testing too! They force you to write the testing code to be better because you need to describe each action. I find in normal unit tests developers use shenanigans to shortcut testing something.
Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill
#117This reminded me of the Twain quote: "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead." Sometimes I don't know how to solve my problems with tiny amounts of code. It often takes skill and effort to come up with an elegant solution. But I agree it is something we should try to do when we can.
> the Twain quote: "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead." Friendly amendment: This has been attributed as being originally from Blaise Pascal in 1656 [0] [0] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Blaise_Pascal
Or maybe even earlier by Cicero. Seems like a common sentiment through history. Thanks for the link!
Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill
#118Love it. I've been thinking [0] about this a lot lately. My rule of thumb these days when tempted to introduce a new dependency is try to build it from scratch first. I might spend 1 hour or 1 day, depending on my estimates of the costs/savings in the long term. I often find I just don't need the dependency. Sometimes I do, but after trying to build it myself I can fully justify why (to myself and others), and also u…
> I do want to mention that these articles always point out downloaded code size as a primary factor in the decision, but I rarely see any data showing how the reduction in code size translates into an improved user experience, based on the principles of human perception. In my experience, the really big gains come from techniques like background fetching.
Size is a huge factor when you're on a limited data plan. Maybe one website won't make a difference, but it adds up.
Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill
#119The most important kind of minimalism in my mind is YAGNI. Every single time I coded something I didn't need yet; I never did, at least not the solution I came up with. And once the complexity is in there, it's very difficult to scale back. This applies to everything I've worked on, from personal projects up to 10KLOC to 3MLOC commercial systems. It's just never a good idea from my experience. The code [0] I write th…
YAGNI conspires against me. When I spend a lot of time building potential future features or creating a bunch of abstractions, I pretty much always never end up using any of them and it ends up as a (potentially huge) waste of time. When I'm building something and thinking about whether or not to make it more abstract / support potential future features, and decide "nah, ain't gonna need it", inevitably within a week…
This is the pain with “agile”. The problem with building the skateboard first and morphing that into a car (as per the cartoon strip meme/trope) is that a car is nothing like a skateboard. It’s a rewrite. If you can know you need a car upfront then you save a YAGNI/OFINI cycle. I’ll let you guess what OFINI means :)
Re: Minimalism – An undervalued development skill
#120At a recent job, people were advocating for ginkgo, a non-standard "reinvents the wheel" type of testing framework in golang. If you don't know golang, it has near perfect tooling out of the box, including a standard test framework. I joined on the brink of this decision i.e. moving to ginkgo. I was the first and only person to ask what does ginkgo do that "go test" does not for us ? Nobody could really answer that.…
> If you don't know golang, it has near perfect tooling out of the box, including a standard test framework.
Does it really?