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Shitlist Driven Development (2016)

sirupsen.com

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Re: Shitlist Driven Development (2016)

#101

Post by ritchiea »

cgriswald wrote: post #90
ritchiea wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. There's been a lot more "commenting without reading the article" here recently than in the past. So when someone comments on an article without anything in the comment that refers back to the article and merely offers the exact advice that was in the article without further analysis or insight: 1. That gives the appearance of a user who hasn't read the article 2. Even if the user did read the article I'm not…

In this case, I think the generous interpretation is that the poster simply missed that section of the article. The generous interpretation basically requires one to conclude he read it, because otherwise he wouldn't make the connection to deprecation from the title alone. The article in question is usually not the topic of conversation on HN. It is better to consider it to be the launching point for the conversation…

It's a shame people don't actually read the articles because, assuming the article is actually insightful, you can have better discussions after the community has actually read the article.

And in the case where people don't read the article and just read the headline, many comments have nothing to do with the article, and end up discussing a less interesting misconception of the submitted article's title/headline.

It's great to be generous with our interpretations of comments here on HN. But I would like to push for a higher standard of discussion, which has always been the draw of this community, particularly for technical articles (and this is actually a high quality technical article!). So I don't think I'll ever be happy being generous to a low value comment that re-states an opinion from the submitted article without adding anything or even without adding much.

Re: Shitlist Driven Development (2016)

#102

Post by munchbunny »

grupthink wrote: post #88
nerdponx wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another, less extreme version: "Your most important collaborator is yourself six months ago, and they won't respond to your emails."

I just spat coffee all over my desk. This is hilarious yet depressing since it reminds me that perhaps the human mind is like the ship of Theseus.

I don't know about my whole brain, but my programming brain totally is.

Now that I've been programming for a nontrivial number of years, it's happened enough that I no longer trust future me to understand anything clever that I do, so I spend much more time structuring code to require minimal context. Failing that, ample documentation, because future me will appreciate having an essay to read much more than current me wants to write it.

Re: Shitlist Driven Development (2016)

#103

Post by jaza »

DonHopkins wrote: post #32

It's better to use a Shiterator, which can yield pieces of shit on demand, lazily enumerate them just in time, and generate infinite streams of shit, instead of allocating all your shit up front, and having your shit together in one place.

Proof of concept:

  def shiterator():
      while true:
          yield random.choice([
              "sinker", "floater", "firehose", "steamy heapy",
          ])

Re: Shitlist Driven Development (2016)

#104

Post by mattnewton »

reader_1000 wrote: post #78

I don't remember the exact project or where I read it but one project added delay (using sleep function) to depreatected methods in order to discourage people using them. After every release, they increased the sleep time so that at one point it became impossible to use it without noticing it. Although I don't know if it is possible to do this for new code trying to use deprecated function and have old code use non-d…

That seems far worse than just deleting the function IMO. The dev teams that most need to refactor are the ones least likely to notice perf slipping.

Re: Shitlist Driven Development (2016)

#105

Post by Gibbon1 »

nerdponx wrote: post #73
boojing wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment made me think of the adage: "Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live"

Another, less extreme version: "Your most important collaborator is yourself six months ago, and they won't respond to your emails."

Last week I found a bug where if I could go back in time 6 months, I'd go back and slap myself silly.

Re: Shitlist Driven Development (2016)

#106

Post by marmshallow »

reader_1000 wrote: post #78

I don't remember the exact project or where I read it but one project added delay (using sleep function) to depreatected methods in order to discourage people using them. After every release, they increased the sleep time so that at one point it became impossible to use it without noticing it. Although I don't know if it is possible to do this for new code trying to use deprecated function and have old code use non-d…

While an interesting tactic, I don't think it's a great idea as it may mean a poorer experience for the customer rather than just the development team.

Re: Shitlist Driven Development (2016)

#107

Post by hchz »

izacus wrote: post #97
jimmaswell wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% evil and pretentious. Not every dev team has the free time to go rewriting everything to the whimsy of library devs that can't help themselves from incessantly shuffling everything around every week. This is how you encourage people to never update and keep security vulnerabilities in the wild.

We're talking about transitions where the library authors deliberately want to (and have good reasons) to migrate whole organization over. It's not they who are pretentious in your scenario ;)

This is not a decision a library developer makes in a reasonable Engineering organization.

Re: Shitlist Driven Development (2016)

#108

Post by ddingus »

jimmaswell wrote: post #91
ddingus wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is hilarious! Also, a fair percentage evil. Nice trick.

100% evil and pretentious. Not every dev team has the free time to go rewriting everything to the whimsy of library devs that can't help themselves from incessantly shuffling everything around every week. This is how you encourage people to never update and keep security vulnerabilities in the wild.

That seems like a mutual discussion, and seems to me this kind of thing happens when it isn't.

Re: Shitlist Driven Development (2016)

#109

Post by gitgud »

jcelerier wrote: post #29
gitgud wrote: post #28

On a somewhat related note: One of the biggest things I've noticed is that simpler pieces of software are less likely to be deprecated, whereas complex codebases quickly become legacy and abandoned...

... windows ? MacOS ? Literally every Adobe software ? Literally every large audio / video / 3d création software ? Every large game engine ? I don't know, I notice pretty much the opposite in the field of software I know - smaller software come and go, but the large ones were there 20 years ago and will likely still be there in twenty years

Yes, that's true, but that's skewed towards what you know, not what's common in the industry.

I can list 10 billionaires in the world, but being a billionaires is not normal...

Re: Shitlist Driven Development (2016)

#110

Post by wizzwizz4 »

gowld wrote: post #93
adewinter wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're saying adults do not use profanity, but that doesn't really make sense.

Adults use words appropriately, not spamming profanity to the point that it's meaningless.

If it's “meaningless”, its not profanity. I don't see your point.
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