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The 4-chan Go programmer

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Re: The 4-chan Go programmer

#81

Post by computerdork »

ljm wrote: post #54
_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 c…

Agree with this. Abstraction and design patterns when used in a well-thought out manner should make large or complex codebases easier to work with.

And like you, have experienced code bases that tried to throw every design pattern in the book at you, even for a relatively simple application, and made it a pain to work with.

But have also seen them used carefully, in a standard company-wide usage that made all the code easier to understand - worked on a high-volume website with a large codebase, where they had micro-services that all used common 3-tier architecture, security-services, tooling... Really-well thought-out and you could work on any one of their ~100 microservices and already have a good understanding of its design, how to build and debug it, how its security worked, it's caching...

Yeah, agreed, its how these techniques are used that determine if they are useful or just add complexity.

Re: The 4-chan Go programmer

#82

Post by neonsunset »

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…

And IsEven! (the not-JS one) https://github.com/Benjlet/IsEven

It looks really innocent. But then you browse it...

Re: The 4-chan Go programmer

#83

Post by taneq »

_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 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.

Procrustination. n. the act of writing an infinite regression of trivial nested 'helper' functions because you're not sure how to actually attack the problem you're trying to solve.

I worked with a guy that did this.

    int CalcNumber(int input) { int val = GetNumberFromInput(input); return val; }
    
    int GetNumberFromInput(int num) { int calcedNumber = 0; for (int i=0; i

Re: The 4-chan Go programmer

#84

Post by _yb2s »

eddd-ddde wrote: post #22
_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…

The coder spectrum, scientists on one end, software engineers on the other. Only balance can save us. I have read code used in research papers. The theoretical math usually goes beyond my comprehension, so I always dive into the code to better understand the logic, only to find... it's way worse... unintelligible. At the end of the day we are used to what we do, and anything different will be foreign to us.

I agree- I'd like to think I'm somewhere in the middle despite being a scientist. I try to write the best code I can, and keep up on best practices, but try to keep things simple.

A lot of the scientific code out there in research papers is so bad, that when you look at it, you realize the whole paper is actually B.S.. What the paper claims was never even implemented, but they just did the most kludgy and quick thing possible to produce the plots in the paper. The whole paper will often hinge on the idea that they did something that generalizes, and are showing specific examples, when actually they just skipped to producing those specific examples - cherry picked no doubt from other ones that they couldn't get to work - and did nothing else. As a reviewer if I notice this and really tear into the authors, it will usually get published and not fixed anyways.

This happens because you get inexperienced new people doing the actual coding work without any proper mentors or instruction, and then they're under enormous pressure for results from a PI that doesn't understand or care about coding at all. It makes the whole thing a house of cards.

Trying to do it 'properly' as a scientist is an uphill battle, because funders, collaborators, etc. expect the quick (and fake) stuff other people seem to be doing. The realities of developing good reusable software and maintaining it long term are not possible to fund through scientific grants.

People writing usable code in academia are doing it for free on the weekends.

Re: The 4-chan Go programmer

#85

Post by honestjohn »

_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…

Many software engineering adjacent courses, starting with AP Computer Science A, are heavy on the Java-style OOP. And you're never designing an actually complex system, just using all the tools to "properly" abstract things in a program that does very little. It's the right idea if applied right, but they don't get a sense of the scale.

The first place this bites a new SWE in the rear, the database. "Let's abstract this away in case we ever want to switch databases."

Re: The 4-chan Go programmer

#86

Post by p1necone »

Dansvidania wrote: post #60
yarg wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

> I often wonder if, unbeknownst to me, I am writing similarly over-complicated software.

If you want to know, and you have a project that you can do this with - pick a reasonably complex project, back it up, don't touch it for a year. Can you work out what the hell is going on? If yes - you're probably doing ok.

Re: The 4-chan Go programmer

#87

Post by Terr_ »

weitendorf wrote: post #30
_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 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…

> This is actually really bad practice and a very “over eager junior engineer” way of writing software.

To recycle a brief analysis [0] of my own youthful mistakes:

> I used to think I could make a wonderful work of art which everyone will appreciate for the ages, crafted so that every contingency is planned for, every need met... But nobody predicts future needs that well. Someday whatever I make is going to be That Stupid Thing to somebody, and they're going to be justified demolishing the whole mess, no matter how proud I may feel about it now.

> So instead, put effort into making it easy to remove. This often ends up reducing coupling, but--crucially--it's not the same as some enthusiastic young developer trying to decouple all the things through a meta-configurable framework. Sometimes a tight coupling is better when it's easier to reason about. [...]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41219130

Re: The 4-chan Go programmer

#88

Post by cedws »

twp wrote: post #62

Sending channels over channels (i.e. chan chan) is a common pattern for publish-subscribe systems, e.g. https://github.com/twpayne/go-pubsub/blob/master/pubsub.go

That’s some pretty Go code, I like it. Just out of interest, why have a channel for subscribe/unsubscribe? Did you want to avoid a mutex on the subscriber map?

Re: The 4-chan Go programmer

#89

Post by Filligree »

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.

At the time, that was one of the only ways to write decent-looking generic code.

Re: The 4-chan Go programmer

#90

Post by vundercind »

devjab wrote: post #76
_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’s called Clean Architecture, Clean Code or SOLID and it’s extremely stupid. It’s widely used because the man behind it, and a lot of other grifters, are extremely good at selling their bullshit. You also have crazy things like the Agile Manifesto to thank “Uncle Bob” for. What is the most hilarious, however, is that these things are sold by people who sometimes haven’t coded professionally since 15-20 years before…

> Anyway, if you want to fuck with them ask them how they avoid L1/L2/L3 chance misses with all that code separation. They obviously don’t but you’re very likely to get a puzzled look as nobody ever taught them how a computer actually works.

It hardly even matters now because each major function will have to wait on the scheduler queue until the cluster manages to assign it a container, then incur a dozen kinds of network slowness spinning up and initializing, then cold-start an interpreter, just to check a value in a painfully-slowly serialized-then-deserialized structure that was passed in as its arguments + context, only to decide based on that check it doesn’t need to do anything after all and shut down.

Processor cache? Lol.

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