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Software Engineering's Greatest Hits [video]

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Re: Software Engineering's Greatest Hits [video]

#11

Post by infocollector »

TDD slide has an error it seems.

In slide 18 Fucci2016 is referred for a replication study with 39 professionals. That study only uses students. That slide quotes Fucci2016, but I do not see that quote in the paper. He talks about TDD and hatemail and is not careful about references? Perhaps this was just a small error - the reference is incorrect. I am not sure.

It seems believable that Test-first vs Test-last might have similar impacts. I just checked one thing in this talk and it turned out to problematic. Has anyone else done fact-checking on his stories?

Re: Software Engineering's Greatest Hits [video]

#12

Post by gtirloni »

kqr wrote: post #8

I was very impressed by Greg Wilson's 2009 presentation, which seems to have disappeared from Video, but I think corresponds to these slides: https://www.slideshare.net/gvwilson/bits-of-evidence-2338367 It truly changed the way I think about not just software development, but it changed my entire view of the world , which is more than I can say of any other presentation. Granted, I was still at a fairly impressionabl…

That video seems to be gone for good but here's a nice discussion about that: https://youtu.be/qDY-Lk1rsQY

Re: Software Engineering's Greatest Hits [video]

#13

Post by Zababa »

citrin_ru wrote: post #3

> Perl is as hard for novices to learn as a language with a randomly-designed syntax Make something accessible to novices IMHO is a wrong goal in many cases. A tool like a programming language used day to day for many months or years. What important is how efficiently you can use it after spending enough time to learn it (I would say a month or two should be enough for most languages if you know already a few, but it…

I think that's a false dichotomy in many cases. For example, compiler errors. Elm and Rust have really good errors, and that benefits everyone. Once that part is done, I agree with you.

I also think you may overestimate the depth of knowledge that the average programmer has about his most used programming language. Languages evolve a lot, sometimes faster than how you used them. People also don't use the same programming language during all their life.

Re: Software Engineering's Greatest Hits [video]

#14

Post by Erikun »

infocollector wrote: post #11

TDD slide has an error it seems. In slide 18 Fucci2016 is referred for a replication study with 39 professionals. That study only uses students. That slide quotes Fucci2016, but I do not see that quote in the paper. He talks about TDD and hatemail and is not careful about references? Perhaps this was just a small error - the reference is incorrect. I am not sure. It seems believable that Test-first vs Test-last might…

It seems he took the title of a different Fucci 2016 paper, it should say "A Dissection of the Test-Driven Development Process: Does It Really Matter to Test-First or to Test-Last?"

This paper contains both the quote and is done on 39 professionals. This seems like an easy mistake to make and not something I feel has an impact on the trustworthiness of his talk

Re: Software Engineering's Greatest Hits [video]

#16

Post by infocollector »

Erikun wrote: post #14
infocollector wrote: post #11

TDD slide has an error it seems. In slide 18 Fucci2016 is referred for a replication study with 39 professionals. That study only uses students. That slide quotes Fucci2016, but I do not see that quote in the paper. He talks about TDD and hatemail and is not careful about references? Perhaps this was just a small error - the reference is incorrect. I am not sure. It seems believable that Test-first vs Test-last might…

It seems he took the title of a different Fucci 2016 paper, it should say "A Dissection of the Test-Driven Development Process: Does It Really Matter to Test-First or to Test-Last?" This paper contains both the quote and is done on 39 professionals. This seems like an easy mistake to make and not something I feel has an impact on the trustworthiness of his talk

Thanks! Seems like short cycles of development including interleaving testing - is the key in this paper. TDD might just achieve this by a fluke, but it should help that - unless you do this TLD or even test addition in cycles. Any thoughts on that?

Re: Software Engineering's Greatest Hits [video]

#17

Post by mikewarot »

bsenftner wrote: post #10
citrin_ru wrote: post #3

> Perl is as hard for novices to learn as a language with a randomly-designed syntax Make something accessible to novices IMHO is a wrong goal in many cases. A tool like a programming language used day to day for many months or years. What important is how efficiently you can use it after spending enough time to learn it (I would say a month or two should be enough for most languages if you know already a few, but it…

After the "toy" languages of Basic and Pascal, my first real programming language was PDP11 Macro-11 Assembly. At the end of that programming class, the final assignment combined all the prior assignments and to the entire class's surprise we had a C compiler. From that laying a foundation experience, I felt extremely comfortable when learning and working in C for a good 20 years after graduation. C++ appeared first…

>the "toy" languages of Basic and Pascal

What makes Pascal a toy language?

Re: Software Engineering's Greatest Hits [video]

#18

Post by mikewarot »

Well, this has a lot of practical knowledge on offer, and I intend to watch it a few more times for it all to sink in.

I've always believed that anyone can learn anything, if they and their teacher both believe it, and put in the effort. I'm glad to see that bias confirmed.

I was really surprised that nobody seems to actually handle errors. This does reflect my experience, in what I thought (until now) was an exception. In about 1985 I was taking a vendor taught course in PL/N at the Norand company (who made hand-held computers used for inventory management). We got to the section of the course about error handling. They described the syntax for checking errors, and how to format things, etc. I asked what happened when you got an error, and both instructors had never been asked that question, and both had ZERO clue about it.

For all the arguments here about in and out of band error handling, this was shocking, and definitely did not confirm any bias.

Re: Software Engineering's Greatest Hits [video]

#19

Post by mikewarot »

ulnarkressty wrote: post #4

Would be great to see a similar talk about hiring software engineers. Do the studies shown even map to the hiring process?

Since most people don't handle errors, I think including some testing functional knowledge of error handling might turn out to be surprisingly effective at gauging how effective a programmer truly is.

Re: Software Engineering's Greatest Hits [video]

#20

Post by dharmaturtle »

mikewarot wrote: post #18

Well, this has a lot of practical knowledge on offer, and I intend to watch it a few more times for it all to sink in. I've always believed that anyone can learn anything, if they and their teacher both believe it, and put in the effort. I'm glad to see that bias confirmed. I was really surprised that nobody seems to actually handle errors. This does reflect my experience, in what I thought (until now) was an excepti…

I'm a big fan of "Railway Oriented Programming" [1]. Basically your code has two paths - the "Ok" route and the "Error" route. Your code won't compile unless you handle the Error case.

However, it requires language level support to use easily - you need mutually exclusive types like discriminated unions. It's harder to do in most OO languages like C#/Java/Javascript, but you can do it with some effort. Which is why most don't.

[1]: https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/rop/

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