Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Software development topics I've changed my mind on

chriskiehl.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 788 posts

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

#241

Post by pinoy420 »

dtquad wrote: post #168

>Frontend development is a nightmare world of Kafkaesque awfulness I no longer enjoy As a backend/systems engineer I recently had to look at a React + Typescript + MobX app from 2019/2020. It is true that that some things, especially the webpack config and Typescript loading, were outdated but the overall design and architecture of the app was still understandable and modern. With some help from ChatGPT it took very…

With ChatGPT I am enjoying Typescript development and learning a lot. Unfortunately with ChatGPT being - in JavaScript terms - decades behind the state of the art. It becomes a little challenging to get it to do what you want. But it gets me 80-90% of the way there 70% of the time. Which is a huge win.

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

#242

Post by stonemetal12 »

ghc wrote: post #214
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…

To reduce your argument to its essence, you're saying typesetting is part of the craft of writing. I've yet to meet an author who believes this (other than enjoying editing their own work as output from a typewriter), and I think the same broadly applies to code. It's not that everyone thinks these things are unimportant, it's that caring deeply about doing them a particular way is orthogonal to the craft. It's somet…

More than one writer refuses to use a computer, preferring typewriters. Harlan Ellison learned how to repair typewriters after he could no longer find anyone to fix his. Stephen King wrote Dreamcatcher with a fountain pen.

Authors totally obsess over details that seem irrelevant to people outside that craft.

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

#243

Post by AnimalMuppet »

snapcaster wrote: post #154
GuB-42 wrote: post #151

Just personal opinions, I guess, I agree with most, but here are some I disagree with: - There is no pride in managing or understanding complexity Complexity exists, you can't make it go away, managing it and understanding it is the only thing you can do. Simple systems only displace complexity. - Java is a great language because it's boring That is if you write Java the boring way. A lot of Java code (looking at you…

I agree with you, i'm much more on the "try stuff out" scale vs. formal methods. That being said, i've worked with people who are the other way and still very effective. I think this one is more of a trade-off or personality thing than something that's "true" or "false"

I agree with you that personality plays a role. But regardless of which way your personality pushes you:

You can never think enough up front to know all you need to know, or even 95%. You're not omniscient enough, and you never will be. Big Design Up Front fails because of this - you have to be able to iterate.

You also have to know what you're trying to build, and at least roughly how you're going to build it. If you don't, no amount of iteration and experimentation will enable you to converge on a solution. You need to experiment and iterate and explore within at least a sketch of a larger picture, not on a blank canvas.

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

#244

Post by lmm »

dustingetz wrote: post #208
lmm wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you can't capture the evaluation of a function as a value, or write the type of it. E.g. try to write a generic function that takes a list and a callback, and applies the callback to every element of the list. Now what happens if your callback throws a checked exception? It doesn't work and there's no way to make it work, you just have to write another overload of your function and copy/paste your code. Now w…

what is "it doesn't work" ? The exception is part of the type, so it doesn't typecheck unless all callbacks are of type "... throws Exception"? What's the problem with that? It's not generic enough, i.e. the problem is Java generics are too weak to write something like "throws "? (Forgive me, it's been 13 years since I wrote java and only briefly, the questions are earnest) edit, so like `@throws[T <: Exception] def…

You can't be polymorphic between not throwing and throwing, or between throwing different numbers of exceptions. You have to write something like:

     List map(Function mapper) { ... }
     List map(FunctionThrows1 mapper) throws E1 { ... }
     List map(FunctionThrows2 mapper) throws E1, E2 { ... }
and so on until you get bored.

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

#245

Post by pjc50 »

v3ss0n wrote: post #136
pjc50 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's not saying you shouldn't do it, he's saying you shouldn't stress over it. The "run the language's standard formatter before commit and then get on with your life" approach.

Everyone on the team need to agree to the linting rules before using linters. Else they will keep wirting their code according to their habits , and then they start to modify the rule that dosen't fit their bad habits when linters hints to fix the code. > run the language's standard formatter Even with very smart linters like `ruff` it cannot fix all of the linting errors. You have to hand fix many of them. What lint…

Dotnet-format for formatting. Can auto fix.

Sonarqube for linting. It's more annoying and not auto fixing, but it achieves the goal of avoiding arguments and does catch some bugs.

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

#246

Post by pinoy420 »

davidw wrote: post #238
ZaoLahma wrote: post #82

> Most programming should be done long before a single line of code is written Nah. I (16+ years developer) prefer to iteratively go between coding and designing. It happens way too often that when you're coding, you stumble across something that makes you go "oh f me, that would NEVER work", which forces you to approach a problem entirely differently. Quite often you also have eureka moments with better solutions th…

Yeah, the other stuff seems sensible or at least "Ok, I can see that", but I definitely disagree with this one. You should spend time thinking about stuff beforehand, sure, but getting your hands dirty is also going to reveal things.

Very surprised at this attitude.

Or am I. The typical engineering savant omniscient to all future past and present engineering roadblocks fixed by “Just”(TM) thinking about it beforehand. I expect this from bay area mid level not someone with credentials.

Strange because I agree with so much more of the article

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

#247

Post by braggerxyz »

> Monoliths remain pretty good

> It's very hard to beat decades of RDBMS research and improvements

> Micro-services require justification (they've increasingly just become assumed)

That is so true. I am still deploying good old .war files to full blown Java app servers backed by simple SQL databases (all clustered and stuff) with some handwritten cli tools and a Jenkins server. Shit is fast, shit scales, shit just works. It is a pleasure to work with

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

#248

Post by botanical76 »

pjc50 wrote: post #113
v3ss0n wrote: post #86

>People who stress over code style, linting rules, or other minutia remain insane weirdos to me. Focus on more important things. This sticks out like sore thumb to me and I think you are coding solo for 10 years. If you manage to lead a team of developers or work with them you are screwed without linting rules and standardized code style. Even if they are applied it takes months to get to a get a team working in harm…

He's not saying you shouldn't do it, he's saying you shouldn't stress over it. The "run the language's standard formatter before commit and then get on with your life" approach.

I do think there's value in manual formatting some code sections. For example, very large arrays, or alignment of semantic parts of a group of mathematical expressions. Ultimately, I think the only thing that matters is that the code is readable, consistent and you don't spend much time on how it looks.

That said, if you have team members who somehow can't or won't copy the surrounding code style, then automatic linting sounds necessary.

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

#249

Post by braggerxyz »

VyseofArcadia wrote: post #161
ZaoLahma wrote: post #82

> Most programming should be done long before a single line of code is written Nah. I (16+ years developer) prefer to iteratively go between coding and designing. It happens way too often that when you're coding, you stumble across something that makes you go "oh f me, that would NEVER work", which forces you to approach a problem entirely differently. Quite often you also have eureka moments with better solutions th…

Iterative work is THE way to work in large legacy codebases. The minute you wade into the code, all of your planning is moot. You don't know what's lurking below the surface. No one knows what's lurking under the surface. Except maybe Dave, because he vaguely remembers about 15 years back talking to some guy who wrote some code 30 years back about it. Greenfield, absolutely design up front you lucky devils, but itera…

Today's greenfield is tomorrow's legacy. So this statement still holds true ;)

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

#250

Post by jghn »

bluGill wrote: post #223
whstl wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. And the laptop excuse is not even valid, I used a 11" MacBook Air for 10 years and even back then 80 always felt extremely limiting for me. I just tested and: even when zooming +1 on VSCode and leaving the minimap open I can fit 140 chars without any horizontal scroll. People demanding 80 columns always have some crazy setups, like an IDE where the editor is just a minuscule square in the centre, like an Osbourn…

Try saying that again when you are 50 and your eyes no longer as good as they used to be. Back when I was 25 I loved the tiny fonts I could fit on my (then incredibly large) 19 inch monitor which I had pushed to the highest resolution. These days even with special computer glasses (magnification and optimized for computer distance) I can't make such tiny text. Now get off my lawn you punks!

Also old. Also can not read the fonts my earlier self would use. Still do not understand the love for narrow columns.
Post reply on HN