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John Carmack on inlined code (2014)

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Re: John Carmack on inlined code (2014)

#151

Post by bluGill »

hansvm wrote: post #126
jeltz wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is usually a positive. Testing tiny subunits usually just makes refactoring and adding new features hard while not improving test quality.

Testing is a tool that sometimes makes your life easier. IME, many (not all) tiny subunits do actually have better tests when examined at that level. You just want to avoid tests which will need to be updated for unrelated changes, and try to avoid writing code which propagates that sort of minutia throughout the codebase: > while not improving test quality The big wins from fine-grained testing are 1. Knowing _where…

The problem is there is rarely a clear interface for your subunit. As such you will want to refactor that interface in ways that break tests in the future. If you are writing another string you can probably come up with a good interface and then write good tests that won't make refactoring hard - but string should be a solved problem for most of us (unless you are writing a new programming language) and instead we are working on problems that are not as clear and only our competitors work on so we can't even learn from others.

Re: John Carmack on inlined code (2014)

#152

Post by wiz21c »

exodust wrote: post #150

For some reason this quote by Carmack stands out for me: > "it is often better to go ahead and do an operation, then choose to inhibit or ignore some or all of the results, than try to conditionally perform the operation." I'm not the audience for this topic, I do javascript from a designer-dev perspective. But I get in the weeds sometimes, maxing out my abilities and bogged down by conditional logic. I like his quot…

my CPU does that all of the time, it is speculative execution :-)

Re: John Carmack on inlined code (2014)

#153

Post by DSMan195276 »

ragnese wrote: post #128
mihaic wrote: post #2

When I first heard the maxim that an intelligent person should be able to hold two opposing thoughts at the same time, I was naive to think it meant weighing them for pros and cons. Over time I realized that it means balancing contradictory actions, and the main purpose of experience is knowing when to apply each. Concretely related to the topic, I've often found myself inlining short pieces of one-time code that mad…

> My goal in most cases now is to optimize code for the limits of the human mind (my own in low-effort mode) and like to be able to treat rules as guidelines. The trouble is how can you scale this to millions of developers, and what are those limits of the human mind when more and more AI-generated code will be used? I think the truth is that we just CAN'T scale that way with the current programming languages/models/…

> protocols, conventions, failsafes, QA teams, etc, etc that are either still hugely difficult to contribute to (Linux kernel, web browsers, etc)

To be fair here, I don't think it's reasonable to expect that once you have "software development skills" it automatically gives you the ability to fix any code out there. The Linux Kernel and web browsers are not hard to contribute to because of conventions, they're hard because most of that code requires a lot of outside knowledge of things like hardware or HTML spec, etc.

The actual submitting part isn't the easiest, but it's well documented if you go looking, I'm pretty sure most people could handle it if they really had a fix they wanted to submit.

Re: John Carmack on inlined code (2014)

#154

Post by defaultcompany »

mihaic wrote: post #2

When I first heard the maxim that an intelligent person should be able to hold two opposing thoughts at the same time, I was naive to think it meant weighing them for pros and cons. Over time I realized that it means balancing contradictory actions, and the main purpose of experience is knowing when to apply each. Concretely related to the topic, I've often found myself inlining short pieces of one-time code that mad…

> My goal in most cases now is to optimize code for the limits of the human mind (my own in low-effort mode)

I think you would appreciate the philosophy of the Grug Brained Developer: https://grugbrain.dev

Re: John Carmack on inlined code (2014)

#156

Post by VyseofArcadia »

> That was a cold-sweat moment for me: after all of my harping about latency and responsiveness, I almost shipped a title with a completely unnecessary frame of latency.

In this era of 3-5 frame latency being the norm (at least on e.g. the Nintendo Switch), I really appreciate a game developer having anxiety over a single frame.

Re: John Carmack on inlined code (2014)

#157

Post by wavemode »

crabbone wrote: post #143
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indoctrination is the exact opposite.

Maybe "indoctrination" was a poor choice of word here. The problem with this maxim is that it welcomes moral relativism. This can be bad on the assumption that whoever is exposed to the maxim is not a proponent of "virtue ethics" (I use this as a catch-all term for various religious ethics doctrines, the underlying idea is that moral truths are given to people by a divine authority rather than discovered by studying…

> maxim suggests that no matter what your moral framework looks like, you should accept that under some circumstances it's OK to have child marriages

You seem to have either misread the maxim, or misunderstood it.

The maxim is not that an intelligent person -must- hold two contradictory thoughts in their head at once - rather, that they should be able to. Being "able to" do something, does not mean one does it in all cases.

To say that the maxim suggests that someone "should" accept that something that is bad, is sometimes good, is a plain misreading of the text. All it's saying is that people -can- do this, if they so choose.

Re: John Carmack on inlined code (2014)

#158

Post by zeroq »

rob74 wrote: post #13
codeflo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s also the effect that a certain code structure that’s clearer for a senior dev might be less clear for a junior dev and vice versa.

Or rather, senior devs have learned to care more for having clear code rather than (over-)applying principles like DRY, separation of concerns etc., while juniors haven't (yet)...

As someone who recently had to go over a large chunk of code written by myself some 10-15 years ago I strongly agree with this sentiment. Despite being a mature programmer already at that time, I found a lot of magic and gotchas that were supposed to be, and felt at the time, super clever, but now, without a context, or prior version to compare, they are simply overcomplicated.

Re: John Carmack on inlined code (2014)

#159

Post by tightbookkeeper »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #44
jeltz wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is usually a positive. Testing tiny subunits usually just makes refactoring and adding new features hard while not improving test quality.

Not according to jon carmack. He stated he switched to pure functional programming in the intro which is basically stating all his logic is in the form of unit testable pure functions.

> pure fp

No he didn’t.

Re: John Carmack on inlined code (2014)

#160

Post by BenoitEssiambre »

Here are some information theoretic arguments why inlining code is often beneficial:

https://benoitessiambre.com/entropy.html

In short, it reduces scope of logic.

The more logic you have broken out to wider scopes, the more things will try to reuse it before it is designed and hardened for broader use cases. When this logic later needs to be updated or refactored, more things will be tied to it and the effects will be more unpredictable and chaotic.

Prematurely breaking out code is not unlike using a lot of global variables instead of variables with tighter scopes. It's more difficult to track the effects of change.

There's more to it. Read the link above for the spicy details.

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