this is a masterpiece of writing -- well done
The Grug Brained Developer (2022)
171–180 of 603 posts
Re: The Grug Brained Developer (2022)
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagged_union In languages influenced by ML (like contemporary Java!) it is common in compiler work in that you might have an AST or similar kind of structure and you end up writing a lot of functions that use pattern matching like switch(node) { type1(a,b) -> whatever(a,b) type2(c) -> process(c) } to implement various "functions" such as rewriting the AST into bytecode, building a sy…
OK yeah I see, that's natural to do with like rust enums Java doesn't support this though I thought?
Currently Java supports records (finalized in JDK 16) and sealed classes (JDK 17) which together work as algebraic data types; pattern matching in switch was finalized in JDK 21. The syntax is pretty sweet
https://blog.scottlogic.com/2025/01/20/algebraic-data-types-...
Re: The Grug Brained Developer (2022)
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was a good discussion on this topic years ago [0]. The top comment shares this quote from Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike, neither of whom I'd call a young grug: > As personal choice, we tend not to use debuggers beyond getting a stack trace or the value of a variable or two. One reason is that it is easy to get lost in details of complicated data structures and control flow; we find stepping through a program les…
I think a lot of “naturals” find visual debuggers pointless, but for people who don’t naturally intuit how a computer works it can be invaluable in building that intuition. I insist that my students learn a visual debugger in my classes for this reason: what the "stack" really is, how a loop really executes, etc. It doesn't replace thinking & print debugging, but it complements them both when done properly.
What do you mean “visual debugger?”
Re: The Grug Brained Developer (2022)
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 conf…
How does someone know twenty C++ developers and zero C developers though?
A lot of fintech. Bloomberg is real into C++.
Re: The Grug Brained Developer (2022)
#175“Good debugger worth weight in shiny rocks, in fact also more” I’ve spent time at small startups and on “elite” big tech teams, and I’m usually the only one on my team using a debugger. Almost everyone in the real world (at least in web tech) seems to do print statement debugging. I have tried and failed to get others interested in using my workflow. I generally agree that it’s the best way to start understanding a s…
I've had more sr devs than I tell me they don't see a benefit to using a debugger, because they have a type system.
Wtaf?
Re: The Grug Brained Developer (2022)
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 conf…
And none of those 20 C++ developers can learn rust? What’s wrong with them?
Flip the question around: what is the benefit when they already know C++? Most of the safety promises one could make with Rust they can already give through proper application of sanitizers and tooling. At least they believe they can, and management believes them. Grug not ask too many questions when the working prototype is already sitting on Grug's desk because someone hacked it together last night instead of spending that time learning a new language.
I suspect that in a generation or so Rust will probably be where C++ is now: the language business uses because they can quickly find 20 developers who have a career in it.
Re: The Grug Brained Developer (2022)
#177“Good debugger worth weight in shiny rocks, in fact also more” I’ve spent time at small startups and on “elite” big tech teams, and I’m usually the only one on my team using a debugger. Almost everyone in the real world (at least in web tech) seems to do print statement debugging. I have tried and failed to get others interested in using my workflow. I generally agree that it’s the best way to start understanding a s…
I don't use debuggers in general development but use them a lot when writing and running automated tests, much faster and easier to see stuff than with print statements.
Re: The Grug Brained Developer (2022)
#178“Good debugger worth weight in shiny rocks, in fact also more” I’ve spent time at small startups and on “elite” big tech teams, and I’m usually the only one on my team using a debugger. Almost everyone in the real world (at least in web tech) seems to do print statement debugging. I have tried and failed to get others interested in using my workflow. I generally agree that it’s the best way to start understanding a s…
There was a good discussion on this topic years ago [0]. The top comment shares this quote from Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike, neither of whom I'd call a young grug: > As personal choice, we tend not to use debuggers beyond getting a stack trace or the value of a variable or two. One reason is that it is easy to get lost in details of complicated data structures and control flow; we find stepping through a program les…
Exactly, these judiciously placed print statements help me locate the site of the error much faster than using a debugger. Then, I could switch to using a debugger once I narrow things down if I am still unsure about the cause of the problem.
Re: The Grug Brained Developer (2022)
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
And none of those 20 C++ developers can learn rust? What’s wrong with them?
Personally I think Rust is better thought out than C++ but that I've got better things to do than fight with the borrow checker and I appreciate that the garbage collector in Java can handle complexity so I don't have to. I think it's still little appreciated how revolutionary garbage collection is. You don't have maven or cargo for C because you can't really smack together arbitrary C libraries together unless the l…
In our case, a garbage collector is a non-starter because it can't make enough guarantees about either constraining space or time to make the suits happy (embedded architecture with some pretty strict constraints on memory and time to execute for safety).
I do think that there are a lot of circumstances a garbage collector is the right answer where people, for whatever reason, decide they want to manage memory themselves instead.
Re: The Grug Brained Developer (2022)
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a conspiracy theory that it’s a pattern pushed by cloud to get people to build applications that: - Cannot be run without an orchestrator like K8S, which is a bear to install and maintain, which helps sell managed cloud. - Uses more network bandwidth, which they bill for, and CPU, which they bill for. - Makes it hard to share and maintain complex or large state within the application, encouraging the use of mo…
It's 100% this; you're right on the money (pun intended). Don't forget various pipelines, IaC, pipelines for deploying IaC, test/dev/staging/whatever environments, organization permissions strategies etc etc... When I worked at a large, uh, cloud company as a consultant, solutions were often tailored towards "best practices"--this meant, in reality, large complex serverless/containerized things with all sorts of inte…
There is now an entire generation of developers steeped in SaaS who literally don’t know how to do anything else, and have this insanely distorted picture of how much power is needed to do simple things.
It’s hard to hire people to do anything else. People don’t know how to admin machines so forget bare metal even though it can be thousands of times cheaper for some work loads (especially bandwidth).
You’re not exaggerating with a raspberry pi. Not at all.