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Programming Is Mostly Thinking (2014)

agileotter.blogspot.com

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Re: Programming Is Mostly Thinking (2014)

#141

Post by kragen »

ben_w wrote: post #122
brabel wrote: post #101

Great article. I just want to comment on this quote from the article: "Really good developers do 90% or more of the work before they ever touch the keyboard;" While that may be true sometimes, I think that ignores the fact that most people can't keep a whole lot of constraints and concepts in their head at the same time. So the amount of pure thinking you can do without writing anything at all is extremely limited. M…

> While that may be true sometimes, I think that ignores the fact that most people can't keep a whole lot of constraints and concepts in their head at the same time. Indeed, and this limitation specifically is why I dislike VIPER: the design pattern itself was taking up too many of my attention slots, leaving less available for the actual code. (I think I completely failed to convince anyone that this was important).

are you talking about the modal text editor for emacs

Re: Programming Is Mostly Thinking (2014)

#142

Post by tsss »

indigoabstract wrote: post #131
brabel wrote: post #101

Great article. I just want to comment on this quote from the article: "Really good developers do 90% or more of the work before they ever touch the keyboard;" While that may be true sometimes, I think that ignores the fact that most people can't keep a whole lot of constraints and concepts in their head at the same time. So the amount of pure thinking you can do without writing anything at all is extremely limited. M…

I had the same thought as I read that line. I think he's actually describing Linus Torvalds there, who, legend has it, thought about Git for a month or so and when he was done thinking, he got to work coding and in six days delivered the finished product. And then, on the seventh day he rested. But for the rest of us (especially myself), it seems to be more like an interplay between thinking of what to write, writing…

Well that explains why Git has such a god awful API. Maybe he should've done some prototyping too.

Re: Programming Is Mostly Thinking (2014)

#143

Post by devsda »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #8

I'm confident enough to tout this number as effectively true, though I should mention that no company I work with has so far been willing to delete a whole day's work to prove or disprove this experiment yet. Long ago when I was much more tolerant, I had a boss that would review all code changes every night and delete anything he didn't like. This same boss also believed that version control was overcomplicated and d…

The bigger problem here is the manager getting involved with code.

Even when done with good intentions, managers being involved in code/reviews almost always ends up being net negative for the team.

Re: Programming Is Mostly Thinking (2014)

#144

Post by kragen »

Kwpolska wrote: post #102
tasuki wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source?

LLMs string together words using probability and randomness. This makes their output sound extremely confident and believable, but it may often be bullshit. This is not comparable to thought as seen in humans and other animals.

unfortunately that is exactly what the humans are doing an alarming fraction of the time

Re: Programming Is Mostly Thinking (2014)

#145

Post by [deleted] »

jbverschoor wrote: post #109
brabel wrote: post #101

Great article. I just want to comment on this quote from the article: "Really good developers do 90% or more of the work before they ever touch the keyboard;" While that may be true sometimes, I think that ignores the fact that most people can't keep a whole lot of constraints and concepts in their head at the same time. So the amount of pure thinking you can do without writing anything at all is extremely limited. M…

Pen, paper, diagrams.

[deleted]

Re: Programming Is Mostly Thinking (2014)

#146

Post by kragen »

MartijnBraam wrote: post #26

Who hasn't accidentally thrown away a days worth of work with the wrong rm or git command? It is indeed significantly quicker to recreate a piece of work and usually the code quality improves for me.

i've never lost work to a wrong git command because i know how to use `git reflog` and `gitk`. it's possible to lose work with git (by not checking it in, `rm -r`g the work tree with the reflog in it, or having a catastrophic hardware failure) but it is rare enough i haven't had it happen yet

Re: Programming Is Mostly Thinking (2014)

#147

Post by kragen »

f1shy wrote: post #121
nickff wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve often found it alarming to see how much better the re-do is. I wonder whether I should re-write more code.

Absolutely. Parallel to thinking LOC is a good metric, comes with "we have to reuse code" Because lots of people think, writing the code is very expensive. It is not!

writing it is not expensive. however, fixing the same bug in all the redundant reimplementations, adding the same feature to all of them, and keeping straight the minor differences between them, is expensive

Re: Programming Is Mostly Thinking (2014)

#148

Post by jll29 »

nickff wrote: post #28
MartijnBraam wrote: post #26

Who hasn't accidentally thrown away a days worth of work with the wrong rm or git command? It is indeed significantly quicker to recreate a piece of work and usually the code quality improves for me.

I’ve often found it alarming to see how much better the re-do is. I wonder whether I should re-write more code.

In the software engineering literature, there is something known as "second system effect": the second time a system is designed it will be bloated, over-engineered and ultimately fail, because people want to do it all better, too much so for anyone's good.

But it seems this is only true for complete system designs from scratch after a first system has already been deployed, not for the small "deleted some code and now I'm rewriting it quickly" incidents (for which there is no special term yet?).

Re: Programming Is Mostly Thinking (2014)

#150

Post by porksoda »

kragen wrote: post #136
brabel wrote: post #101

Great article. I just want to comment on this quote from the article: "Really good developers do 90% or more of the work before they ever touch the keyboard;" While that may be true sometimes, I think that ignores the fact that most people can't keep a whole lot of constraints and concepts in their head at the same time. So the amount of pure thinking you can do without writing anything at all is extremely limited. M…

yeah, i just sketched out some code ideas on paper over a few days, checked and rechecked them to make sure they were right, and then after i wrote the code on the computer tonight, it was full of bugs that i took hours and hours to figure out anyway. debugging output, stepping through in the debugger, randomly banging on shit to see what would happen because i was out of ideas. i would have asked coworkers but i'm f…

I've no coworkers either, and over time both I and my code suffer for it. Some say thinking is at it's essence a social endeavor.
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