Your code may be elegant, but mine works • Hacker News Board

Re: Your code may be elegant, but mine works

#171

Post by kyberias » Thu, Feb 06, 2014, 8:41 PM UTC

Karunamon wrote: post #142

kyberias wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author has presented an argument. Whether the author himself generates any code at all has absolutely no effect on the validity of his arguments.

Since when is credibility not a thing?

His arguments can be validated only based on its internal logical structure. One should not try to invalidate it based on his claimed credibility. That's ad hominem.

See here: http://plover.net/~bonds/adhominem.html

Example:

A: "All rodents are mammals, but a weasel isn't a rodent, so it can't be a mammal." B: "I'm sorry, but I'd prefer to trust the opinion of a trained zoologist on this one." B's argument is ad hominem: he is attempting to counter A not by addressing his argument, but by casting doubt on A's credentials. Note that B is polite and not at all insulting.

Re: Your code may be elegant, but mine works

#172

Post by memracom » Fri, Feb 07, 2014, 1:14 AM UTC

You danced around one important point about technical debt. True professionals do not avoid technical debt, but they do account for it. That means that when we take shortcuts we should be aware of what kind and amount of technical debt we are incurring, and we should track it, probably in a similar way to tracking bugs. Then, the stakeholders of the project can look through the technical debt and prioritise which items that they want to fix and when.

The bad thing about our industry is that too many people take shortcuts and don't tell anybody about it or keep any records to assist in fixing the weaknesses that are introduced in the software. Sometimes this is malicious because a developer is trying to give the appearance of being a mythical 10x developer.

In fact, I believe that the vast majority of so-called 10x developers are actually frauds. Most people are unlikely to encounter such a developer outside of the blogosphere and conferences, unless you are fortunate enough to work for one of the big technology companies like Facebook, Amazon or Google, who have the resources to find the real McCoy.

Re: Your code may be elegant, but mine works

#173

Post by Karunamon » Fri, Feb 07, 2014, 7:00 PM UTC

kyberias wrote: post #171

Karunamon wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since when is credibility not a thing?

His arguments can be validated only based on its internal logical structure. One should not try to invalidate it based on his claimed credibility. That's ad hominem. See here: http://plover.net/~bonds/adhominem.html Example: A: "All rodents are mammals, but a weasel isn't a rodent, so it can't be a mammal." B: "I'm sorry, but I'd prefer to trust the opinion of a trained zoologist on this one." B's argument is ad homi…

Credibility is a heuristic to determine what arguments should be evaluated and which should be discarded. It is not reasonable to expect every person to critically evaluate the word of every person who has something to say on a subject.

Re: Your code may be elegant, but mine works

#174

Post by atlantic » Sun, Feb 09, 2014, 8:48 PM UTC

bmm6o wrote: post #170

atlantic wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was involved in a software development project last year, in which the entire remote development team of 20 people got fired, because the software architect implemented a bunch of best practices, design patterns and state-of-the-art frameworks, without any thought as to how this would impact development time. The problem was that he was the only one who was familiar with most of this stuff, so there was a very stee…

Things like best practices become more important the larger the team. Are you suggesting the project would have been more successful if they had been less concerned about code organization and unit testing (or whatever you mean by "best practices")?

The problem was not the use of best practices per se, but the uncritical use of these practices. For example, it's good to use design patterns, but not every pattern is appropriate to every situation. We got to a point where it might take a full day to make a change to a table, and then make the corresponding changes to all the various repositories and entities. Similarly, it's good to use the latest technologies, but using beta versions of unpublished frameworks was a bit over the top, both because documentation was scarce and because they were still buggy.