I'm not going to delete my .emacs file even though it is ugly, it just works.
Throw away your first draft of your code
161–170 of 230 posts
Re: Throw away your first draft of your code
#162I just lost a first version of some assembly code I wrote on my Apple II through my own mistake: my code wrote to the part of memory where the assembler kept the source code. When it seemed to work (I hadn't noticed I'd lost my code yet) I saved this (corrupted) version of the code to my floppy, corrupting even the floppy. I had to write the same thing from scratch again, but this time with the full understanding of the problem in my head, and I think the rewritten version is better because of that.
Re: Throw away your first draft of your code
#163I also discuss this in my book Street Coder in the section titled “Write it from scratch”.
Re: Throw away your first draft of your code
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
by REPL here you mean jupyter notebook?
I also primarily write ML-focused Python. For me, having originally learned R and C at the same time, nothing has ever surpassed RStudio as a dev environment. For the past several years my preferred setup has been tmux and Vim with vim-slime in one pane and IPython in the other. (Personally, and speaking only for myself, I hate Jupyter notebooks with a burning passion. I think they are one of the worst things ever to…
Why do you hate Jupyter notebooks so much that it reaches “worst thing to ever have happened“ status?
Why do you love R Studio so much? (I’ve never used it, so no judgment)
Re: Throw away your first draft of your code
#165I feel like this a symptom of trying to design while you code instead of putting down the text editor and just designing your solution instead.
Re: Throw away your first draft of your code
#166If you know that you're possibly keeping the code, you do things in a "proper" way, which means moving slower. Put in all the exception handlers, all the log statements. Structure the code nicely, refactor things while you're in there, modularize them properly. After all, it's going to be reused.
This is where it all comes from. You don’t have to throw away code if it doesn’t need refactoring, modularization and so on to satisfy that “reuse” mantra from the beginning. Healthy reuse comes in two flavors:
- a copy of the code
- a separate well-maintained, versioned and documented library
Anything reuse-focused in between is mostly snakeoil not worth drinking and is often the reason why your code has so many intricacies in it that you have to perform “recon missions” before actual coding or estimating. You’ve built a dozen of poorly-documented ad hoc libraries into your project. There’s no surprise it may require a proper source code expedition to detect and recrystallize parts that a new requirement shattered this time.
Re: Throw away your first draft of your code
#167The temptation to throw away all of your code - be it a prototype or a "grown" code base - arises often. Often it is a bad idea. I get it, though, there is an inherent attractiveness in the idea of starting fresh from a clean slate. Except, more likely than not, you'll soon find yourself in a similar situation to the one you started from. The fundamental problem is that it is easy to underestimate the edge cases. Sur…
I don't really feel that attraction to complete rewriting. I wonder if the people who do are very smart, and thus able to hold more state in their head, so ugly code bothers them more even if it's not actively a problem, because they are able to have background tasks in their mind to worry about it? And at the same time, perhaps their code is less encapsulated, because they didn't optimize for abstraction, they optim…
ALL abstractions are leaky - this is an objectively true statement.
As others said it's not for beauty, it to make sure if there is abstraction it fits the problem. If there is encapsulation it doesn't get in the way. For some coders they can get it on the first try and there is no reason for them to rewrite code. For the rest of us mid coders we need to explore first as well as make sure all cases we desire for Lib/API work.
Re: Throw away your first draft of your code
#168If you know that you're possibly keeping the code, you do things in a "proper" way, which means moving slower. Put in all the exception handlers, all the log statements. Structure the code nicely, refactor things while you're in there, modularize them properly. After all, it's going to be reused. This is where it all comes from. You don’t have to throw away code if it doesn’t need refactoring, modularization and so o…
Eh, don't get me started on how many people take a well known abstraction then build another abstraction on top of it. You already had the abstraction!
Re: Throw away your first draft of your code
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't really feel that attraction to complete rewriting. I wonder if the people who do are very smart, and thus able to hold more state in their head, so ugly code bothers them more even if it's not actively a problem, because they are able to have background tasks in their mind to worry about it? And at the same time, perhaps their code is less encapsulated, because they didn't optimize for abstraction, they optim…
ALL abstractions are leaky - this is an objectively true statement. As others said it's not for beauty, it to make sure if there is abstraction it fits the problem. If there is encapsulation it doesn't get in the way. For some coders they can get it on the first try and there is no reason for them to rewrite code. For the rest of us mid coders we need to explore first as well as make sure all cases we desire for Lib/…
You're right, I should have been more clear, all abstractions are leaky, but some are right enough most only notice occasionally.
Re: Throw away your first draft of your code
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is such a HN phenomenon it infuriates me. Read article. Then read comment that misconstrues article to be something completely different, accompanied with loud critique. Read replies all in violent agreement to obviously self-evident strawman.
Sadly, it’s an everywhere phenomenon :(
[dead]