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Show HN: Code Words, a quarterly publication about programming

codewords.hackerschool.com

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Re: Show HN: Code Words, a quarterly publication about programming

#31

Post by thaumaturgy »

doktrin wrote: post #30
thaumaturgy wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a bad article written by someone who I guess must be a novice who thinks he knows something now but will look back on this 5 years later and cringe The article's author appears to be Robert Lefkowitz. If it is, then the author transitioned from nuclear physics to programming in the 1970s, has been a speaker at PyCon, currently seems to be writing software in Haskell, Ruby, and Java, gave several talks at OSCon in 2…

So, you can't really just appeal to the author's authority without addressing a single one of the parents points. Is he wrong? Do the statements from the article make sense to you? Because the stuff he quoted looked like a bunch of nonsense.

Oh, I have no idea if he's wrong or not. Honestly, programming isn't something I usually think deeply about; I'm sort of tired of all the usual arguments.

But you don't have to assume that someone's a novice to disagree with them. That seems to be a common thing for programmers to do to each other and it's disgusting.

Re: Show HN: Code Words, a quarterly publication about programming

#32

Post by forrestthewoods »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #10
blubbi2 wrote: post #5

(commenting on one of the articles) Wow. Just stumbled upon the following quote and read the corresponding article. > Programming language comparisons usually focus on the brevity and expressiveness of the language. If the solution to a programming problem has fewer lines and is “easier to understand” or “clearer” in one language than another, that is an argument for using the former over the latter. This comparison…

> - https://codewords.hackerschool.com/issues/one/why-are-object... . > In all seriousness, this is one of the best articles I've ever read. I couldn't agree more with the author. I'm not sure if you are being serious (you say you are, so Po's law), but this is a bad article written by someone who I guess must be a novice who thinks he knows something now but will look back on this 5 years later and cringe; examples.…

Global variables are terribad (imo). Dependency injection is good (imo). I don't think the article is particular clear with everything it's trying to say, but those two points seem pretty reasonable, no?

Re: Show HN: Code Words, a quarterly publication about programming

#33

Post by doktrin »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #31
doktrin wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, you can't really just appeal to the author's authority without addressing a single one of the parents points. Is he wrong? Do the statements from the article make sense to you? Because the stuff he quoted looked like a bunch of nonsense.

Oh, I have no idea if he's wrong or not. Honestly, programming isn't something I usually think deeply about; I'm sort of tired of all the usual arguments. But you don't have to assume that someone's a novice to disagree with them. That seems to be a common thing for programmers to do to each other and it's disgusting.

I feel ya. We're definitely a critical community, both for better and worse.

Re: Show HN: Code Words, a quarterly publication about programming

#34

Post by Dewie »

doktrin wrote: post #30
thaumaturgy wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a bad article written by someone who I guess must be a novice who thinks he knows something now but will look back on this 5 years later and cringe The article's author appears to be Robert Lefkowitz. If it is, then the author transitioned from nuclear physics to programming in the 1970s, has been a speaker at PyCon, currently seems to be writing software in Haskell, Ruby, and Java, gave several talks at OSCon in 2…

So, you can't really just appeal to the author's authority without addressing a single one of the parents points. Is he wrong? Do the statements from the article make sense to you? Because the stuff he quoted looked like a bunch of nonsense.

> So, you can't really just appeal to the author's authority without addressing a single one of the parents points.

The 'appeal to authority' is addressing one of the parents points/claims: that he seems to be a rookie.

Re: Show HN: Code Words, a quarterly publication about programming

#35

Post by Blackthorn »

doktrin wrote: post #30
thaumaturgy wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a bad article written by someone who I guess must be a novice who thinks he knows something now but will look back on this 5 years later and cringe The article's author appears to be Robert Lefkowitz. If it is, then the author transitioned from nuclear physics to programming in the 1970s, has been a speaker at PyCon, currently seems to be writing software in Haskell, Ruby, and Java, gave several talks at OSCon in 2…

So, you can't really just appeal to the author's authority without addressing a single one of the parents points. Is he wrong? Do the statements from the article make sense to you? Because the stuff he quoted looked like a bunch of nonsense.

The parent's points were literally about his authority, so the response was perfectly fine.

Re: Show HN: Code Words, a quarterly publication about programming

#36

Post by thmcmahon »

therealdrag0 wrote: post #4

I really like the approach taken in the introduction to functional programming article.

Yep great article. As a beginner programmer I find functional more intuitive than OOP, there just seems to be less abstract concepts and boilerplate.

Re: Show HN: Code Words, a quarterly publication about programming

#37

Post by MaulingMonkey »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #10
blubbi2 wrote: post #5

(commenting on one of the articles) Wow. Just stumbled upon the following quote and read the corresponding article. > Programming language comparisons usually focus on the brevity and expressiveness of the language. If the solution to a programming problem has fewer lines and is “easier to understand” or “clearer” in one language than another, that is an argument for using the former over the latter. This comparison…

> - https://codewords.hackerschool.com/issues/one/why-are-object... . > In all seriousness, this is one of the best articles I've ever read. I couldn't agree more with the author. I'm not sure if you are being serious (you say you are, so Po's law), but this is a bad article written by someone who I guess must be a novice who thinks he knows something now but will look back on this 5 years later and cringe; examples.…

I think the problem is more that it was written with a specific conclusion in mind, without checking if the logic actually held up in the end. Terminology does get a bit stretched, at best...

>> if you make the mistake of defining public “setter” methods, then the instance variables with setter methods become effectively global variables: if the value of the instance variable is incorrect at some point, that incorrect value might have been set anywhere in your code.

You can end up in the same situation by spreading a pointer to your local int variable into e.g. a global pointer just as easily, without so much as a struct. Or more frequently in practice: By finding someone else's buffer overflows, when coding in C. This is a problem, but it's less of an OOP problem and more of a "mutable data with nonobvious mutators" problem (or a "OOP as practiced distressingly frequently" problem?)

This starts to go away when your memory access is safe, and when your variables (be they objects or not) are constant (which you'd get enforced for free in a purely functional language - and which I enforce by overusing const in C++ - either of which is compatible with OOP). To a lesser extent, it starts to go away when your variables are only referenced locally - but that's left me wondering about previous values all too often.

Re: Show HN: Code Words, a quarterly publication about programming

#39

Post by [deleted] »

Blackthorn wrote: post #35
doktrin wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, you can't really just appeal to the author's authority without addressing a single one of the parents points. Is he wrong? Do the statements from the article make sense to you? Because the stuff he quoted looked like a bunch of nonsense.

The parent's points were literally about his authority, so the response was perfectly fine.

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Code Words, a quarterly publication about programming

#40

Post by rdc12 »

From the article Option and null in dynamic languages [1]

"Languages and libraries are defined not by what they make possible (the Church-Turing thesis tells us that), but by what they make easy."

The Church-Turing thesis tells us about what is fundamentally computable, what a library decides to implement is not the same thing.

Libraries are not about what is fundamentally computable, but about abstracting away the mechanics of some problem.

While no library can solve the halting problem, that in no way implies that two libraries expose the same things to the end user of the library, even in a related field.

[1] https://codewords.hackerschool.com/issues/one/option-and-nul...

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