Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code

steveonstuff.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 395 posts

Re: There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code

#341

Post by 62951413 »

skohan wrote: post #153
rawoke083600 wrote: post #135

So True ! After 25+ years of coding, I know one thing. I STILL don't know how to "code correctly". And apart from a few gifted individuals (Rob Pike, Fabrice Bellard Bobby Bingham [ffMpeg team] etc) I'm HIGHLY suspicious of ppl and programmers who claim "they can program correctly" and that "this xyz is the correct way/stack/method/arch". Background:CS grad, start coding at around 13 (thank you dad !) I am well verse…

The more code I've written, the less I care about code quality. I think the things I could point to in my coding practice which would make the code I write now better than the code I wrote 10 years ago would be: - I minimize interdependencies (changing a line of code should not affect something un-related) - I go for abstractions later, only when I need them, rather than trying to think of the perfect abstraction/des…

I hope in real life you have enough discipline to practice things which people like me would call "code quality". Because taken literally it would lead to all those code bases I have had to maintain - barely a useful test in sight, an empty README.md, no javadocs, classes mixing multiple responsibilities, hundreds of LoCs in one class. Somehow all those things correlate and people who show a modicum of care in one area have others in a reasonable shape too.

It worries me that with the leetcode fad in vogue people will pay even less attention to the things which actually matter in real software development.

Re: There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code

#342

Post by hinkley »

skohan wrote: post #330
hinkley wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it were loosely coupled it wouldn’t be an anecdote in this conversation. There is no “I”, there is no “you”. There is only “us”. I can only control Us so much, and I don’t have a time machine. People who only have green field projects as their context are very frustrating in conversations like this. They make suggestions like, well, don’t fuck up in the first place. I don’t know what your history is but that’s the…

Not that it matters but I've worked on a mix of green-field projects and mature codebases in various domains with teams of various sizes over more than a decade of professional experience. I could assume you're throwing shade on "prolific programmers" out of some sense of insecurity, but it wouldn't be fair to generalize about strangers on the internet ;)

If everyone is discussing a problem that you don’t see, then why offer your simple solution except to appear smart? And who needs to appear smart? That’s your insecurity. Not mine.

Re: There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code

#343

Post by hinkley »

skohan wrote: post #305
hinkley wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can go really really fast when you don’t give a shit about consequences. Often the worst code comes from prolific people. There’s just so much if it. And if you touch it you will break it at least 1% of the time, so you have to pick your battles when you are trying to keep the ratio under control.

If you write loosely-coupled code, it shouldn't be that easy to break things unless you're careless.

Nobody in this whole post is talking about loosely coupled code. If you find someone complaining about how hard it is to modify loosely coupled code, you have my permission to fire them.

For everyone else this is tautological. Good code can continue to be good code.

Re: There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code

#344

Post by skohan »

62951413 wrote: post #341
skohan wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more code I've written, the less I care about code quality. I think the things I could point to in my coding practice which would make the code I write now better than the code I wrote 10 years ago would be: - I minimize interdependencies (changing a line of code should not affect something un-related) - I go for abstractions later, only when I need them, rather than trying to think of the perfect abstraction/des…

I hope in real life you have enough discipline to practice things which people like me would call "code quality". Because taken literally it would lead to all those code bases I have had to maintain - barely a useful test in sight, an empty README.md, no javadocs, classes mixing multiple responsibilities, hundreds of LoCs in one class. Somehow all those things correlate and people who show a modicum of care in one ar…

I think you might have missed the part of my post about eventually arriving at a well factored codebase

Re: There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code

#345

Post by geodel »

mannykannot wrote: post #295
skohan wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this just hasn't been my experience. If you're working on a house you measure twice and cut once because the cost of reworking physical materials is a lot more expensive than the cost of doing a second measurement. If you could delete half your house and re-build it at zero cost, it might be more valuable to just go for the first attempt and learn from it rather than trying to do everything in theory up front. I…

The development of the relational model of databases is an example where thinking things through led to a radically different and superior solution, going in a very different direction than ad-hoc development had produced, or was ever likely to produce. At the time Codd published his seminal paper, there were no implementations of those ideas. It is also notoriously difficult to get the design of concurrency primitiv…

Yeah, but >99% code is about using relational DBs and concurrency primitives not developing them. There are somethings that would depend on solid theoretical understanding but most of the software today is much more amenable to trying out things first and reworking failed parts.

Re: There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code

#346

Post by skohan »

kaba0 wrote: post #338
skohan wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just having trouble understanding what you're talking about. Like what would be a concrete example of how a poor up-front design decision would paint you into an unrecoverable corner?

My experience says that you might not need much design for a typical CRUD app, but try to write a JVM/compiler/database and you will quickly see that a bad design pretty much aborts the given project and you have to start from almost scratch. There is no incrementel rewrite between different stack/heap handling as those are an absolutely central parts of the design, which are pretty much impossible to try to encapsul…

Yeah I mean for sure it depends on the domain.

But it's interesting you mentioned compilers - I'm in the process of writing one, and I very much used an incremental approach.

The first pass I essentially wrote a parser and a component which walked the AST and produced output. At a certain point it was clear that local knowledge of the AST wasn't sufficient to capture non-local details about the program which were required to produce the correct output. I got away for a short time with dirty tricks, but eventually transitioned to a new design: I kept the lexer and parser, and implemented a data driven IR in the style of an ECS system to be built up before emitting output.

So I threw out the initial output component, but I learned a ton by starting with an end-to-end compiler, however incomplete. If I hadn't taken that step, and tried first to plan the perfect IR on paper, I am certain I would have reached an inferior result.

edit: and even the IR and compiler middleware is loosely coupled. The IR is essentially a set of flat data tables, each of which is built independently by walking the AST. And the compiler is implemented in a series of independent passes: i.e. one pass to build the IR, one pass to derive type information etc. so it's very much grown into a series of independent components, each of which could be independently rewritten without affecting the others very much.

Re: There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code

#347

Post by skohan »

hinkley wrote: post #339
skohan wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that it matters but I've worked on a mix of green-field projects and mature codebases in various domains with teams of various sizes over more than a decade of professional experience. I could assume you're throwing shade on "prolific programmers" out of some sense of insecurity, but it wouldn't be fair to generalize about strangers on the internet ;)

No, It’s an overdeveloped sense of justice. I just punch up at condescending people. Every discipline has a bunch of armchair people who don’t understand the problem who think “get more exercise” is the response to depressed people or people with chronic fatigue, “eat fewer calories” is the answer to weight issues or diabetes, or “write it right the first time” is a useful response to people trying to solve real worl…

> Kindly let the grownups talk

Well one of us is certainly being condescending ;)

And did you really answer twice to the same comment? My goodness I must have really struck a nerve.

Re: There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code

#348

Post by skohan »

d0mine wrote: post #337
skohan wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this just hasn't been my experience. If you're working on a house you measure twice and cut once because the cost of reworking physical materials is a lot more expensive than the cost of doing a second measurement. If you could delete half your house and re-build it at zero cost, it might be more valuable to just go for the first attempt and learn from it rather than trying to do everything in theory up front. I…

I don't know about your experience but refactoring is just not on the menu in most commercial environments I'm familiar with, therefore if you always pick the first solution that cones to find, it is likely you have to leave with the consequences of the hack for a long time (until the system crumbles under its own complexity).

I guess I have been lucky - I've always been able to negotiate for time to refactor if needed, or just find time for it in lulls between tasks. If you're in an environment where engineers don't have the freedom to improve their codebase I would not consider that to be a healthy practice, but that certainly would change the value proposition around upfront design.

Re: There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code

#349

Post by mannykannot »

geodel wrote: post #345
mannykannot wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The development of the relational model of databases is an example where thinking things through led to a radically different and superior solution, going in a very different direction than ad-hoc development had produced, or was ever likely to produce. At the time Codd published his seminal paper, there were no implementations of those ideas. It is also notoriously difficult to get the design of concurrency primitiv…

Yeah, but >99% code is about using relational DBs and concurrency primitives not developing them. There are somethings that would depend on solid theoretical understanding but most of the software today is much more amenable to trying out things first and reworking failed parts.

In practice, one does not write a single line of code without feeling that it is somehow getting you closer to the desired outcome. If you have the ability to anticipate that it will not contribute to that goal, or that it will create problems on the way, or that there is a better way, even before you have written and tested it, then it would be counterproductive not to do so.

Re: There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code

#350

Post by [deleted] »

ziml77 wrote: post #279
ajuc wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen this happening a lot: - you have the same if-then-else in 3 places in code with 3 different effects - you refactor it to polimorphism (Enum with a few overloaded methods works well in java) - now one of these places need additional condition so you make it a little more complex - year passes - you have eldritch abomination of OOP instead of 3 if-then-elses with slightly different conditions because at no po…

Exactly my experience with polymorphism. It starts out looking super clean but then the business requirements shift and each has its own edge cases that turn it into a giant mess, often ending up as a mix of both polymorphism and convoluted if statements.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN