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

Cold Showers

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 363 posts

Re: Cold Showers

#161

Post by SmooL »

WalterBright wrote: post #149
laserlight wrote: post #128

> Hype: "Identifiers should be self-documenting! Use full names, not abbreviations." > Shower: Researchers had programmers fix bugs in a codebase, either with all of the identifiers were abbreviated, or where all of the identifiers were full-words. They found no difference in time taken or quality of debugging. That's a very weird take on the statement. The downside of using abbreviations is probably dominated by the…

People nearly always gravitate towards abbreviations in natural language. The more a word is used, the more likely it gets shortened. LA for Los Angeles, Frisco for San Francisco, Vicki for Victoria, Jay for Jason, Dub for George W Bush, Doozy for Duesenberg, and on and on. Why should programming be different?

Because abbreviations are nice when there's a shared context that is perpetually "in memory" - I don't have to think to know what LA stands for. However, that is not the case when debugging. It is almost certainly the case for the person who wrote the code originally, but it is certainly not the case for the next person to come read it afterwards. IMO code is meant to be read, so I try to never use abbreviations (other than e.g. _i_ as a for loop index, which, given it's pervasive use, falls under the category of "shared context").

Re: Cold Showers

#162

Post by albntomat0 »

greymalik wrote: post #142
aranchelk wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure all statically typed languages are slower to develop in than comparable dynamic ones? I used to be thoroughly convinced this was true, but 3 things are now making me doubt it: 1) Statically typed languages with inference don’t require time spent writing signatures. 2) I know I’ve spent time chasing down bugs in dynamically typed software that would have been caught by a type checker. 3) I also know I’ve…

> 1) Statically typed languages with inference What are some strong examples of this? Haskell does an amazing job with it. Java technically supports some amount of inference, but it doesn’t reduce verbosity by all that much. Apart from those I haven’t run into it.

Off the top of my head, Rust and OCaml do as well. Ive had to occasionally specify a type, but it works well in practice.

Re: Cold Showers

#163

Post by readbeard »

keybored wrote: post #23
number6 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most Times I can't bring myself to get into a cold shower. If I start warm I can cool down from there. Is there a way to start cold and go even colder?

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with starting warm and cooling down. The only thing that matters is that you can go cold enough for a decent amount of time.

For me, there is some value in facing the cold water head-on in the morning ("Wow, this is going to be cold, but here goes!" Great way to start the day. I have to admit though, the cold water is not super cold here this time of year.

Re: Cold Showers

#164

Post by chrismcb »

CapmCrackaWaka wrote: post #86
thom wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There appear to be slightly weird commercial reasons behind this, because gaming GPUs have great CUDA performance but NVIDIA won’t let you put them in a datacentre. So buying your data scientists gaming laptops (RGB and all) generally works out faster for any reasonable price point. That said, a dedicated server with a decent Xeon and MKL set up correctly generally outperforms CPU-bound stuff.

I think it really depends on your data size. All the benchmarks I can find are on massive datasets, with tens of millions of rows or thousands of columns. I’m sure there are significant performance gains in these situations. Our data just wasn’t big enough.

There was a time when I thought 10s of millions of rows was massive. Now it just send run of mill.

Re: Cold Showers

#165

Post by falcolas »

sumy23 wrote: post #62
cloogshicer wrote: post #14

> Static Typing reduces bugs. At least to me, the big advantage of static typing is not that it (allegedly) reduces bugs, but that it aids my understanding and helps in navigating the program. It's a tool for thinking and communicating.

It’s basically self-evident that static analysis reduces bugs. It’s trivial to construct an example of where type information would catch a bug. Unless there is some reason that including type information increases bugs, the existence of a single example where type information catches a bug would prove that overall type information reduces total bug count.

> It’s basically self-evident that static analysis reduces bugs.

And yet, per TFA, it’s not; at a minimum it’s clearly not “self evident”.

Why do we developers value our personal experience above studies, while dunking on average citizens for doing the same?

Guess we’re just as human as the rest of humanity; subject to the same urge to trust our own beliefs over contrary evidence.

Re: Cold Showers

#166

Post by hsn915 »

IMO a lot of truths in programming are not amenable to "scientific studies".

Static typing is objectively better than dynamic typing for the vast majority of cases, but you can't capture this in a scientific experiment or study.

The only thing you can do is find people who are similarly experienced, break them up into groups (n=1 is also ok) and ask them to complete a specific project, and see how much time it takes. But even then there are so many caveats. The experiment must be set up such that the presense of extensive library support for a particular task is not a confounding factor. There's also the open question of how do you measure these people's skills before the experiment begins?

Re: Cold Showers

#167

Post by falcolas »

kangda123 wrote: post #99
BlargMcLarg wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just local context. Reading a dense book is still more difficult than reading a less dense book, given a fairly similar amount of information and style in conveying that information. Larger codebases suffer the same problem you mention in a different way, and cargocults in most static languages tend to advocate very verbose writing styles. Where this falls apart, the more verbose writing style hasn't been pr…

It is just a fair bit harder to figure out the types as program grows.

Not in my experience. Language engines are good enough to help most of the time,

And typed or untyped, you’re only ever reasoning about the types in the context you’re working in, not the entire program.

Re: Cold Showers

#168

Post by falcolas »

randtrain34 wrote: post #129
jacobsenscott wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never found static typing to aid in my understanding of a program. For example: def add_item_to_cart(item) vs void add_item_to_cart(IItem item) They are equally easy to understand. The first is easier to read.

But suppose you were unfamiliar with the code, the 2nd tells you what fields/methods are available for "item", and furthermore most IDEs will use that info to populate autocomplete suggestions and such.

Language engines exist for Python and Ruby (and Lisp, etc.)as well, and they handle autocomplete and refactoring quite handily.

Re: Cold Showers

#169

Post by wtetzner »

sethammons wrote: post #158
number6 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most Times I can't bring myself to get into a cold shower. If I start warm I can cool down from there. Is there a way to start cold and go even colder?

For these people that claim taking cold showers, I want water temp. Out of the tap, in summer, my water is 53 degrees (f), upper 40s in winter. I'm not sure I could get through a whole shower sans hypothermia. Edit: looked it up. 30min-2hr for hypothermia at that range. Typically I take a 15-20 minute shower, so only flirting with hypothermia. I love a hot, hot shower. Best advancement in technology in the last thous…

I suspect that if you start taking cold showers, you’ll also star taking shorter showers.

Re: Cold Showers

#170

Post by wtetzner »

moralestapia wrote: post #2

>Hype: "Static Typing reduces bugs." Oof, that one is a huge can of worms.

Really, like everything, there’s nuance. E.g. not all type systems are equal, not all programmers are equally effective at taking advantage of the type system, etc.
Post reply on HN