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The Grug Brained Developer (2022)

grugbrain.dev

41–50 of 603 posts

Re: The Grug Brained Developer (2022)

#41

Wasn’t HTMX just a meme? I can’t really tell if it’s serious because of Poe’s Law.

htmx sucks: https://htmx.org/essays/htmx-sucks/

well, at least he is (you are?) consistent in this style of criticizing others' ideas with satirical sarcasm fueled prose focused on tearing down straw men.

Re: The Grug Brained Developer (2022)

#42

Content 1, Style 0 Thinking you are too smart leads to all sorts of trouble, like using C++ and being proud of it. If you think your intelligence is a limited resource however you'll conserve it and not waste it on tools, process and the wrong sort of design.

It would be really embarrassing to use one of the most popular, time-tested languages. Even if we decided to use Zig for everything, hiring for less popular languages like Zig, lua, or Rust is significantly harder. There are no developers with 20 years experience in Zig

Being at a firm where the decision to use C++ was made, the thought process went something like this:

"We're going to need to fit parts of this into very constrained architectures."

"Right, so we need a language that compiles directly to machine code with no runtime interpretation."

"Which one should we use?"

"What about Rust?"

"I know zero Rust developers."

"What about C++?"

"I know twenty C++ developers and am confident we can hire three of them tomorrow."

The calculus at the corporate level really isn't more complicated than that. And the thing about twenty C++ developers is that they're very good at using the tools to stamp the undefined behavior out of the system because they've been doing it their entire careers.

Re: The Grug Brained Developer (2022)

#43

might be some good points in here but it's sooo hard to read.

Since you're being downvoted I just wanted to say I agree. I'm sure it was cathartic to write but it's not a good way to actually communicate.

Also like a lot of programming advice it isn't actually that useful. Advice like "avoid complexity" sounds like it is good advice, but it isn't good advice. Of course you should avoid complexity. Telling people to do that is about as useful as telling people to "be more confident".

We mostly learn to avoid complexity through trial and error - working on complex and simple systems, seeing the pitfalls, specific techniques to avoid complexity, what specific complexity is bad, etc. Because not all complexity is bad. You want simplicity? Better trade in you Zen 4 and buy a Cortex M0. And I hope you aren't running a modern OS on it.

Ok "avoid unnecessary complexity"? Great how exactly do you know what's unnecessary? Years of experience that's how. Nothing you can distill to a gimmicky essay.

Re: The Grug Brained Developer (2022)

#45

This has by far the best discussion of the visitor pattern I've yet to come across.

I don't work in typical OO codebases, so I wasn't aware of what the visitor pattern even is. But there's an _excellent_ book about building an interpreter (and vm) "crafting interpreters". It has a section where it uses the visitor pattern.

https://craftinginterpreters.com/representing-code.html#the-...

I remember reading through it and not understanding why it had to be this complicated and then just used a tagged union instead.

Maybe I'm too stupid for OO. But I think that's kind of the point of the grug article as well. Why burden ourselves with indirection and complexity when there's a more straight forward way?

Re: The Grug Brained Developer (2022)

#46

Content 1, Style 0 Thinking you are too smart leads to all sorts of trouble, like using C++ and being proud of it. If you think your intelligence is a limited resource however you'll conserve it and not waste it on tools, process and the wrong sort of design.

C++ called and filed a complaint about receiving a haymaker of a suckerpunch out of nowhere.

Re: The Grug Brained Developer (2022)

#48

  sad but true: learn "yes" then learn blame other grugs when fail, ideal career advice
When I first entered the corporate world I thought this wasn’t true, there was just poor communication on part of technical teams. I learn I wrong. grug right.

Re: The Grug Brained Developer (2022)

#49
The anecdote about rob pike and logging made me chuckle.

Fun fact about Google: logging is like 95% of the job, easily... From tracking everything every service is doing all the time to wrangling the incoming raw crawl data, it's all going through some kind of logging infrastructure.

I was there when they actually ran themselves out of integers; one of their core pieces of logging infrastructure used a protocol buffer to track datatypes of logged information. Since each field in a protocol buffer message is tagged with an integer key, they hit the problem when their top-level message bumped up against the (if memory serves) int16 implementation limit on maximum tag ID and had to scramble to fix it.

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