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The Grug Brained Developer

grugbrain.dev

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Re: The Grug Brained Developer

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most well-intentioned "grug" developers will write software so simple that it becomes it's own form of complexity: a giant mud-ball of for-loops, while-loops, variable assignments, and other wonderful side effects. Instead of addressing complexity head-on with abstraction, "grug" will beat "galaxy brain" over the head. Hah. Related, i became disgruntled with my previous favorite language for this reason. It promote…

Alright I'll bite :) Python? Java? C? Assembly?

Not who you're replying to, but Tcl was that language for me. Dead-simple syntax, documentation, and behavior. I loved it. But also dead-simple tools. And if you wanted to do anything that wasn't a "solved problem" already, you had to write your own library.

When I switched my focus to Python, everything was more effort but I could also do _much_ more with it.

Re: The Grug Brained Developer

#43

Ah, the ample club of wishful thinking. There are two general ways of approaching software design (and I'm paraphrasing Tony Hoare here): 1. You can write software so simple there are obviously no errors 2. You can write software so complex there are no obvious errors One thing that escapes "grug" is that achieving 1. often requires more sophistication than their magical club allows. Most well-intentioned "grug" deve…

could you give an example of (1)?

Only because i have run into weirdness with printf calling malloc, back in the day. Even hello world makes me a little nervous about those claims.

But I'd love to see a sample with explicit assertions about the environment, so I could be sure there are obviously no errors.

Re: The Grug Brained Developer

#44

Ah, the ample club of wishful thinking. There are two general ways of approaching software design (and I'm paraphrasing Tony Hoare here): 1. You can write software so simple there are obviously no errors 2. You can write software so complex there are no obvious errors One thing that escapes "grug" is that achieving 1. often requires more sophistication than their magical club allows. Most well-intentioned "grug" deve…

That's the classic "only coder" mindset. Instead of being uncomfortable learning about software architecture, side effects or even pure functions, tries to solve every problem with for and while loops.

Sir, may I remind you that when you get down to it, your architecture and higher order functions are all made of branching and for and while loops, and branching and for and while loops are all made of goto.

Re: The Grug Brained Developer

#47
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alright I'll bite :) Python? Java? C? Assembly?

Not who you're replying to, but Tcl was that language for me. Dead-simple syntax, documentation, and behavior. I loved it. But also dead-simple tools. And if you wanted to do anything that wasn't a "solved problem" already, you had to write your own library. When I switched my focus to Python, everything was more effort but I could also do _much_ more with it.

> And if you wanted to do anything that wasn't a "solved problem" already, you had to write your own library.

For which language is that statement not true ?

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