Live data from Hacker News

Rob Pike: The Best Programming Advice I Ever Got.

informit.com

51–60 of 142 posts

Re: Rob Pike: The Best Programming Advice I Ever Got.

#51
As he says it's indeed a matter of style/preference.

I've personally spent 10 years in academia deeply understanding many things that more often than not were good for nothing. Now I'm OK with just getting things to work quickly and not looking back.

PS: I'm a really fast typer.

Re: Rob Pike: The Best Programming Advice I Ever Got.

#52
post #44
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've just hit a real actual problem in the code. Factoring that out isn't premature, it's responding to reality.

I was reacting to the idea that instead of fixing the immediate bug you just found you're going to redesign the whole thing to prevent that type of bug from occurring ever again in the future.

And simonh was pointing out that it's not really premature if it's already occurred :)

Don't get me wrong, you have a point - there is certainly a balance to be struck.

Re: Rob Pike: The Best Programming Advice I Ever Got.

#54
post #24

This is relevant: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=316 Also, I'm curious about something. Those of you who are good at building mentals models: are you also visual thinkers?

Sometimes visual but more often I imagine the code physically. It has weight, or friction, or rigidity, depending on what aspects of the code I'm trying to think about.

Re: Rob Pike: The Best Programming Advice I Ever Got.

#55
post #39

Interesting to note that he has now replaced C with Go (GoLang)

I also found that interesting, but not a big surprise since he is one of the co-authors of go...

Agreed - we'd probably all be most productive working in a language we'd designed ourselves, irrespective of the merits or demerits of that language for other programmers.

Re: Rob Pike: The Best Programming Advice I Ever Got.

#56
Good advice - after I noticed that I solved most of my tough debugging problems on the walk home from work, I started going outside to take a walk around the building whenever I got stuck. Removing yourself from immediate access to the code lets you think at a higher level how it's organized and what could go wrong.

Re: Rob Pike: The Best Programming Advice I Ever Got.

#57
i've recently had to deal with similar situation, accept the person that refactored my code didn't make such a big improvement. instead he went on vacation and a lot of things broke when we released the code. even though i've looked at all his check-ins, and they looked harmless, i was not able to foresee the problems we experienced when this code run in prod..

i'm conflicted because on one hand i don't want to be the code police that simply refuses any changes from others, but at the same time its hard to be responsible for a system when so many core updates are done by other team mates w/out proper testing.

i think the happy middle ground is: no such changes in common trunk. Do those in a branch, and only merge them in when benefits are clear, team is on board with all changes, you're ready to release to production, and will be around during the release.

Re: Rob Pike: The Best Programming Advice I Ever Got.

#59
Here's a link to the (incomplete) sample chapter on their website for 'The Practice of Programming' on Debugging.

http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/tpop/debugging.html

I had this in my wishlist for a while. This just made me buy it.

Wonder how different it will be from Code Complete 2.

Re: Rob Pike: The Best Programming Advice I Ever Got.

#60
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also found that interesting, but not a big surprise since he is one of the co-authors of go...

Agreed - we'd probably all be most productive working in a language we'd designed ourselves, irrespective of the merits or demerits of that language for other programmers.

Yeah, but not everybody designs a language. Right? [1]The usage of a language directly depends on comfort, productivity and efficiency. Maybe ''Pike's language'' was a factor, but all the above relations[1] come true in wider light.
Post reply on HN