Too scared to write a line of code • Hacker News Board

Re: Too scared to write a line of code

#91

Post by jes5199 » Sat, May 25, 2013, 1:50 AM UTC

ay wrote: post #57

tikhonj wrote: post #46

I don't know--my impression is that most people go to far in the other direction. They write code with no thought at all for the future, and then shortly have nightmarish debugging sessions in spaghetti code that's impossible to extend or reuse. All in the name of a rather extreme "worse is better" philosophy. I've certainly experienced this with some of the people I worked with recently. Anything you win in the shor…

Great advice IMHO. One trick that I found useful for myself (good chunk of my code is "hobby" code that I myself revisit some months later, so not really "production" problem but nonetheless almost the real-world maintenance example): - make the function fit in your head. Literally. Make it fit in one screen, if you can. If it does not, think how you can make it fit on the screen - everything, including variable defi…

One screen is way too big! Make each function do a single thing. Even in verbose languages, you should be able to get most of them down to 5 lines or less - and this isn't actually difficult (except for coming up with names for all of them) the transformation is actually very mechanical, so much so that if you're using an IDE it can probably "extract method" for you, but even doing it by hand is trivial once you get the knack of it.

Re: Too scared to write a line of code

#92

Post by rapind » Sat, May 25, 2013, 1:51 AM UTC

willholloway wrote: post #77

michaelochurch wrote: post #58

The Bad Guys want you to feel insecure about your work, your position, your relative standing, and everything else because their worst nightmare is that software engineers and scientists and thinkers wake up and realize how much leverage they would actually have if they were organized and capable of looking out for their own interests. We'd reshape the entire business landscape, and the power relationships between us…

As usual Michael, I agree wholeheartedly. The Bad Guys are plentiful and they include scope creepers, late/non payers and idea guys offering equity. Our tribe (to borrow from your parlance) is goodhearted and kind and usually sees the best in people. That is until we are crushed under the disillusioning reality that the Screwheads (to borrow from HST's parlance) rule the world and will exploit us instinctively. Our r…

Either I'm missing a bunch of literary references, or you guys are starting a cult. Maybe both.

Re: Too scared to write a line of code

#93

Post by zerooneinfinity » Sat, May 25, 2013, 1:54 AM UTC

"We are what we do repeatedly." If you spend time thinking about best practices, it becomes easier and less time consuming. You need a balance of it early in your career but if you're constantly working at it, it'll become second nature. In my opinion, the best programmers are the ones who have exceptional practical wisdom, who know when to utilize a rule and when to yield to exceptions (no one likes a ferengi programmer -- http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/02/the-ferengi-program...).

Re: Too scared to write a line of code

#94

Post by btian » Sat, May 25, 2013, 2:11 AM UTC

gfosco wrote: post #87

tikhonj wrote: post #46

I don't know--my impression is that most people go to far in the other direction. They write code with no thought at all for the future, and then shortly have nightmarish debugging sessions in spaghetti code that's impossible to extend or reuse. All in the name of a rather extreme "worse is better" philosophy. I've certainly experienced this with some of the people I worked with recently. Anything you win in the shor…

How long have you been programming, and how many jobs have you had writing code in an actual business? Your profile says you're a student, so I'm curious how you can feel justified in writing such a thesis. Personally, after 16 years in the industry, I do stress about my code as described in the article... Not about making it work, because that will happen regardless, but about how. It affects my ability to code, bec…

His CV on his website http://jelv.is/resume.pdf.

Seems he's fairly experienced. Anyway such things are highly subjective, and YMMV

Re: Too scared to write a line of code

#95

Post by wb14123 » Sat, May 25, 2013, 2:15 AM UTC

This point is very like an engineer's point, which have many years of development experience. He tell me when I'm a intern in the company. I always like to write perfect and complete code that time. But you must write code first, so that other people could cooperation with you. Just write and see and test, then you can find the problem.

Re: Too scared to write a line of code

#96

Post by stevenwei » Sat, May 25, 2013, 2:19 AM UTC

Zakharov wrote: post #66

tikhonj wrote: post #46

I don't know--my impression is that most people go to far in the other direction. They write code with no thought at all for the future, and then shortly have nightmarish debugging sessions in spaghetti code that's impossible to extend or reuse. All in the name of a rather extreme "worse is better" philosophy. I've certainly experienced this with some of the people I worked with recently. Anything you win in the shor…

If you write code too slowly, go faster. If you write code too quickly, go slower. You can tell if you're too slow when you've spent two weeks thinking about the program and have neither working code nor a detailed design, or if you've created a detailed design only to realize upon implementation you'd gone about it entirely the wrong way. You can tell if you're too fast if you find yourself spending more time cleani…

Yes. To add to that:

Sometimes you'll want to plan ahead because the nature of the problem means you'll have a harder time cleaning things up later.

Other times, you want to move quickly because creating castle-in-the-sky architectures is not the best use of your time (especially if it becomes paralyzing).

Experience helps you determine which type of situation you're dealing with.

Re: Too scared to write a line of code

#97

Post by calebgilbert » Sat, May 25, 2013, 2:34 AM UTC

amboar wrote: post #43

calebgilbert wrote: post #13

Same school of thought: 'Write Code Like You Just Learned How to Program' - http://prog21.dadgum.com/87.html

That article is simplistic. Sure, write code that you won't care about in the future like you don't care about it, but if you take that approach with anything requiring longterm reliability or maintenance then you're setting yourself up for failure. Essentially: Think about it. Use techniques and tricks where appropriate, but at least consciously make the decision to do a less than stellar job and document your reaso…

I believe the spirit the article was written in has value. Obviously one should use common sense and still apply the best practices that they know of at the time.

Re: Too scared to write a line of code

#98

Post by ww520 » Sat, May 25, 2013, 2:38 AM UTC

michaelochurch wrote: post #58

The Bad Guys want you to feel insecure about your work, your position, your relative standing, and everything else because their worst nightmare is that software engineers and scientists and thinkers wake up and realize how much leverage they would actually have if they were organized and capable of looking out for their own interests. We'd reshape the entire business landscape, and the power relationships between us…

Well said. Wow, Zed's motherfucker link is gold. Thanks for sharing it.

Re: Too scared to write a line of code

#99

Post by plorkyeran » Sat, May 25, 2013, 2:53 AM UTC

tikhonj wrote: post #46

I don't know--my impression is that most people go to far in the other direction. They write code with no thought at all for the future, and then shortly have nightmarish debugging sessions in spaghetti code that's impossible to extend or reuse. All in the name of a rather extreme "worse is better" philosophy. I've certainly experienced this with some of the people I worked with recently. Anything you win in the shor…

You're going to see a lot more code from people who err on the side of too little thought rather than too much though for a pretty obvious reason: people who are too scared to start coding... aren't writing any code for you to read later.

Also, while it's easy to identify code which has had too little thought put into it, it's often very difficult to identify code which has had too much thought put into it. The best solutions don't look like the result of lots of hard work, but rather make hard problems look like simple problems that would be trivial to solve.

Re: Too scared to write a line of code

#100

Post by ww520 » Sat, May 25, 2013, 2:58 AM UTC

rmason wrote: post #9

I remember when Facebook's front page code leaked. I am no PHP expert, but it was pretty ugly code. Probably today you couldn't get hired at Facebook if you wrote code like that. http://techcrunch.com/2007/08/11/facebook-source-code-leaked... I've heard many arguments where people will tell you, it won't scale. Or you're doing it all wrong by writing quick and dirty procedural code. Quite frankly scaling is about the…

Hindsight is always 20/20. It's difficult to judge a piece of code after the fact. The quality of the code, including maintainability, is a result of various trade-offs. We don't know what compromises the developer was making at the time. We don't know what was the highest priority at the time. May be they were short of money and working code however shitty produced at the shortest amount of time was the most important. Suck to be the guy doing the maintenance but if there's no working product, there would be no maintenance.

We programmers have a ugly tendency to judge less than stellar codes written by others. It made us feel superior to pick apart mistakes others have made. The fact is software development is a series of technical and non-technical trade-offs. I certainly had fell in the same trap before. These days I just appreciate they can ship a working product and get it off the ground.