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The 4-chan Go programmer

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Re: The 4-chan Go programmer

#51

Post by lowbloodsugar »

_yb2s wrote: post #7

As a scientist that ends up working closely with actual professional software engineers... lots of the stuff they do looks like this do me, and I can't for the life of me make sense of why you'd do it. I have seen a single line of code passed through 4 "interface functions" before it is called that call each other sequentially, and are of course in separate files in separate folders. It makes reading the code to figu…

I mean we are in “midwit meme” territory here. 4 levels of indirection look fine to an idiot. A “midwit” hates them and cleans them up. But a very seasoned engineer, thinking about the entire system, will happily have 4 layers of indirection.

Like anyone using a HashSet in Rust is already doing four layers of indirection: rusts HashSet is actually wrapping a hashbrown::HashSet. That set is wrapping a HashTable and the HashTable is wrapping an inner Table.

If you’re having trouble comprehending such code then a good IDE (or vim) that can navigate the code on a keypress should help.

Re: The 4-chan Go programmer

#52

Post by jayd16 »

_yb2s wrote: post #7

As a scientist that ends up working closely with actual professional software engineers... lots of the stuff they do looks like this do me, and I can't for the life of me make sense of why you'd do it. I have seen a single line of code passed through 4 "interface functions" before it is called that call each other sequentially, and are of course in separate files in separate folders. It makes reading the code to figu…

ITT people who have no context passing judgement on code they've never seen described by someone who doesn't know what they're describing.

Re: The 4-chan Go programmer

#54

Post by ljm »

_yb2s wrote: post #7

As a scientist that ends up working closely with actual professional software engineers... lots of the stuff they do looks like this do me, and I can't for the life of me make sense of why you'd do it. I have seen a single line of code passed through 4 "interface functions" before it is called that call each other sequentially, and are of course in separate files in separate folders. It makes reading the code to figu…

On the contrary, and I do agree that software engineers take the abstraction too far when they don’t know better, I don’t hold the code produced by people who aren’t software engineers by profession in particularly high esteem either.

You’re looking at two extremes: the codebase that is spread out too much with too much abstraction, and the codebase with zero abstraction that is basically a means to an end. In both cases they are difficult to work with.

I’ve certainly dealt with enough python, JS and PHP scripts that are basically written with the mindset of ‘fuck this, just give me what I want’, whereas people working in the code day to day need the abstractions to facilitate collaboration and resilience.

Re: The 4-chan Go programmer

#55

Post by LudwigNagasena »

_yb2s wrote: post #7

As a scientist that ends up working closely with actual professional software engineers... lots of the stuff they do looks like this do me, and I can't for the life of me make sense of why you'd do it. I have seen a single line of code passed through 4 "interface functions" before it is called that call each other sequentially, and are of course in separate files in separate folders. It makes reading the code to figu…

It happens so that we don't have "a single 15,000 line file that had been worked on for a decade". We don't have the luxury of asking the GitHub team and John Carmack to fix our code when we are forced to show it to the stakeholders.

Re: The 4-chan Go programmer

#57

Post by stroupwaffle »

_yb2s wrote: post #7

As a scientist that ends up working closely with actual professional software engineers... lots of the stuff they do looks like this do me, and I can't for the life of me make sense of why you'd do it. I have seen a single line of code passed through 4 "interface functions" before it is called that call each other sequentially, and are of course in separate files in separate folders. It makes reading the code to figu…

I think something people forget is that computer programming is a craft which must be honed.

A lot of people are introduced to it because computers are such an important part of every discipline, but unfortunately the wealth of mistakes maintaining many a code base occur from those who, quite honestly, simply lack experience.

In the authors case, they don’t explain the simple understanding that every pointer is simply adding a dimension to the data.

int *data; // one dimensional vector

int **data; // two dimensional matrix

int ***data; // three dimensional matrix

Which is one way to interpret things. The problem is that when folks learn computer programming using Python (or another high level language), it’s like using power tools bought from the hardware store compared to some ancient, Japanese wood working technique. The latter takes time to understand and perfect.

Ten thousand hours, so I’ve heard ;)

Re: The 4-chan Go programmer

#58

Post by 7thaccount »

_yb2s wrote: post #7

As a scientist that ends up working closely with actual professional software engineers... lots of the stuff they do looks like this do me, and I can't for the life of me make sense of why you'd do it. I have seen a single line of code passed through 4 "interface functions" before it is called that call each other sequentially, and are of course in separate files in separate folders. It makes reading the code to figu…

This perfectly summarizes a lot of production code I've seen. We once replaced like 20 Java files with like a single page of easy to understand and "to the point" code.

Re: The 4-chan Go programmer

#59

Post by lanstin »

zachmu wrote: post #42
weitendorf wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually really bad practice and a very “over eager junior engineer” way of writing software. You’re not off base at all that it seems excessive and confusing. It’s the kind of thing that seems technically complex and maybe even “elegant” (in isolation, when you first write the “interesting” code) at first but becomes a technical nightmare when used in real software that has to grow around and with it. You’re…

when I was learning Go, I read a guide that told you to fire off a goroutine to walk a tree and send the values back to the main goroutine via a channel. I think about that "just an example" guide a lot when I see bad channel code. For me the biggest red flag is somebody using a channel as part of an exported library function signature, either as a param or a return value. Almost never the right call.

I've used that pattern to write tools to e.g. re-encrypt all whatever millions of objects in an S3 bucket, and examine 400m files for jars that are or contain the log4j vulnerable code. I had a large machine near the bucket/NFS filer in question, and wanted to use all the CPUs. It worked well for that purpose. The API is you provide callbacks for each depth of the tree, and that callback was given an array of channels and some current object to examine; your CB would figure out if that object (could be S3 path, object, version, directory, file, jar inside a jar, whatever) met the criteria for whatever action at hand, or if it generated more objects for the tree. I was able to do stuff in like 8 hours when AWS support was promising 10 days. And deleted the bad log4j jar few times a day while we tracked down the repos/code still putting it back on the NFS filer.

The library is called "go-treewalk" :) The data of course never ends back in main, it's for doing things or maybe printing out data, not doing more calcualation across the tree.

Re: The 4-chan Go programmer

#60

Post by Dansvidania »

yarg wrote: post #50
_yb2s wrote: post #7

As a scientist that ends up working closely with actual professional software engineers... lots of the stuff they do looks like this do me, and I can't for the life of me make sense of why you'd do it. I have seen a single line of code passed through 4 "interface functions" before it is called that call each other sequentially, and are of course in separate files in separate folders. It makes reading the code to figu…

It gets worse (this isn't too much of an exaggeration): https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris... . Sometimes there's a scary lack of understanding and competency where you'd expect to find it. As an undergrad, I once spent about half an hour peer programming with a computer science PhD - it was enlightening. He didn't have the slightest understanding of software - calling me out for things like…

the fizzbuzz repo hurt. It is oh so true though.

I often wonder if, unbeknownst to me, I am writing similarly over-complicated software. People seem to be unable to tell, so I doubt I can either. It makes me second-guess my code a lot.

Is there any reliable/objective/quantitative way to evaluate such a thing? The repo is a great example of what not to do, but it's so extreme it's hardly useful in practice.. (nor it should care to be..as a joke)

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