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Software development topics I've changed my mind on

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Re: Software development topics I've changed my mind on

#51

Post by steezeburger »

Tade0 wrote: post #34
lbj wrote: post #23

I actually disagree with about half of this. > Typed languages are essential on teams with mixed experience levels Essential, meaning 'cannot exist without', it's not. I've seen this work a number of places. > Blind devotion to functional is dumb. Managing/limiting state is always a worthwhile pursuit. I'd think he would agree since he seems to value simplicity > People who stress over code style, linting rules, or o…

Regarding code style etc. I get where he's coming from as plenty of people made entire careers on pursuing the perfect linter configuration. They're a net negative in every project.

I'd love some clarification if he meant people who bike shed or people who care to setup a linter and formatter as part of their workflow.

Re: Software development topics I've changed my mind on

#52

Post by sfn42 »

jajko wrote: post #39
latexr wrote: post #22

> Most won't care about the craft. Cherish the ones that do, meet the rest where they are > (…) > People who stress over code style, linting rules, or other minutia remain insane weirdos to me. Focus on more important things. What you call “stressing over minutiae” others might call “caring for the craft”. Revered artisans are precisely the ones who care for the details. “Stressing” is your value judgement, not neces…

Not really. Obsessing over breaking lines after famous 80 chars in Eclipse was, is and will be idiotic to be polite. Surprisingly large amount of people were obsessed by this long after we got much bigger screens, if that was ever an argument (it wasn't for me). 2 spaces vs 4 spaces or tab. Cases like these were not that rare, even though now it seems better. That's not productive focus of one's (or team's) energy an…

I'd say avoiding long lines is one of the most important rules. I regularly have 2-3 files open side by side, I don't want to have to scroll sideways to read the code.

80 characters is a bit on the low end imo but I'd rather have the code be too vertical than too horizontal. Maybe 120-150 is a more reasonable limit. It's not difficult to stay within those bounds as long as you don't do deep nesting which I don't really want to see anyway because it's hardly ever necessary and it makes code more difficult to read.

Re: Software development topics I've changed my mind on

#53

Post by bryanrasmussen »

latexr wrote: post #22

> Most won't care about the craft. Cherish the ones that do, meet the rest where they are > (…) > People who stress over code style, linting rules, or other minutia remain insane weirdos to me. Focus on more important things. What you call “stressing over minutiae” others might call “caring for the craft”. Revered artisans are precisely the ones who care for the details. “Stressing” is your value judgement, not neces…

as others note, most of this minutia can be automatically enforced. Anything that can be automated is not craft.

Re: Software development topics I've changed my mind on

#54

Post by secondcoming »

xnorswap wrote: post #35
latexr wrote: post #22

> Most won't care about the craft. Cherish the ones that do, meet the rest where they are > (…) > People who stress over code style, linting rules, or other minutia remain insane weirdos to me. Focus on more important things. What you call “stressing over minutiae” others might call “caring for the craft”. Revered artisans are precisely the ones who care for the details. “Stressing” is your value judgement, not neces…

The solution is to have computers enforce the code style. Pick a linter, pick a set of rules, and then forget about them. Things I beleive: - If you're picking up on code-style in PRs then your toolchain is backward. - If you're changing linting rules every month then you're focussed on the wrong things - It's better to have a consistent style than a perfect style

This is what we did with clang-format on our code base.

The result is occasionally ugly code and nobody is 100% happy but at least it's consistent.

Re: Software development topics I've changed my mind on

#56

Post by imjonse »

> ORMs are the devil in all languages and all implementations. Just write the damn SQL

It depends on what you're writing. I've seen enough projects writing raw SQL because of aversion to ORMs being bogged down in reinventing a lot of what ORMs offer. Like with other choices it is too often a premature optimization (for perf or DX) and a sign of prioritizing a sense of craftsmanship at the expense of the deliverables and the sanity of other team members.

Re: Software development topics I've changed my mind on

#57

Post by TheCapeGreek »

> Most won't care about the craft. Cherish the ones that do, meet the rest where they are

This becomes easier when you've transitioned from someone who cares to someone who doesn't. Some of us burn out from the industry and fall out of love with the job.

I understand my curmudgeon-ly ex-colleagues a lot more nowadays.

Re: Software development topics I've changed my mind on

#58

Post by nrjames »

Regarding scaling… one thing that drives me bonkers about Apache Superset is that the maintainers are absolutely adamant that it must be deployed with kubernetes because it’s meant to scale. The project works just fine with a simple and slim docker/compose deployment, which is easier for small teams to manage. The lead maintainers refuse to document this and have unnecessarily sprinkled the docs with warnings.

Re: Software development topics I've changed my mind on

#59

Post by aswerty »

latexr wrote: post #22

> Most won't care about the craft. Cherish the ones that do, meet the rest where they are > (…) > People who stress over code style, linting rules, or other minutia remain insane weirdos to me. Focus on more important things. What you call “stressing over minutiae” others might call “caring for the craft”. Revered artisans are precisely the ones who care for the details. “Stressing” is your value judgement, not neces…

In my opinion, I think the author is criticizing bike shedding [1] rather than meaningful decisions. Of course some people will differ on whether a decision is one or the other. But as a whole, not sweating the details is a good quality to have whatever road in life you are on.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality

Re: Software development topics I've changed my mind on

#60

Post by jkrejcha »

karatinversion wrote: post #48
rad_gruchalski wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if you don’t handle them then… yes? What else can be done?

There's also the fact that common methods threw exception types that were not final, and in fact overly generic. If I call a method that declares itself to throw NoSuchFileException or DirectoryNotEmptyException, I can have a pretty good idea what I might do about it. If it throws IOException without elaboration, on the other hand...

With regards to I/O, there are generally any number of weird errors you can run into, file not found, directory exists, host unreachable, permission denied, file corrupt, etc etc. Like anything file related will be able to throw any of those exceptions at almost any point in time.

I think IOException (or maybe FileSystemException) is probably the best you can do in a lot of I/O cases unless you can dedicate time to handling each of those specially (and there's often not a lot much more you can do except for saying "Access is denied" or "File not found" to the user or by logging it somewhere).

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