Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nobody's just reading your code

akkartik.name

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 188 posts

Re: Nobody's just reading your code

#101

Post by _asummers »

marcosdumay wrote: post #86
radicalbyte wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I'm not afraid of it, but it can take a lot of time. It's also extremely hard to estimate so gets avoided in scrum.

> It's also extremely hard to estimate so gets avoided in scrum. So, one more time Scrum seems to be unable to support actual development needs.

The inability to justify time spent in Scrum doesn't make the time not get spent, it just gets hidden, defeating the whole point. I abhor Scrum, but I would also argue that in this case the development task weight just gets inflated for "unknowns" on the task.Instead of a 5 maybe it's an 8, or whatever.

Re: Nobody's just reading your code

#102

Post by stenecdote »

jesperlang wrote: post #88

Reading code always felt awkward, slow and ineffective. The cognitive load is huge, you have to compute some things while memorizing others and at the same time keep track of flows. Thats why I always have pen and paper while diving into a new big code base, you simply can't keep it in your head. But something we forget often is... the goal of reading code is almost always to understand a system or some part of it. A…

As the author of the post, just wanted to reply and say I'm totally open to the notion that the solutions I proposed will not solve the problem. I'm much more sure about the problem than I am about the solution.

A google maps zoom system for code sounds awesome, although I have no idea how that might work.

Re: Nobody's just reading your code

#103

Post by stenecdote »

antirez wrote: post #62

This is a bit western centric maybe, because I see Chinese developers reading tons of code, to the point that I receive an incredible amount of Redis PRs about conceptual bugs that can never happen in practice, since some Chinese developer is reading the code and doing the math in her/his head.

I wish one of these pull requesters would comment on this post! I'd love to hear how they're going about reading your code and whether they're actually using Redis or just reading it for enjoyment.

Re: Nobody's just reading your code

#104

Post by stenecdote »

kazinator wrote: post #12

We read code for all kinds of purposes other than to make an intended change. Like How the heck does this behavior (good or bad, expected or not) come about? Is this correct behavior assured in every case? What are all the possible values of these poorly documented configuration parameters or other inputs? Will this apparently working operation break under concurrency? Why is this so slow for these inputs, or under t…

Hi kazinator, thanks for your comment (I'm the post's author). When I originally wrote the post, I actually had a whole section about "reading for questions", which discussed how the best way to read without modifying a program is to read to answer focused questions you have about the codebase. It kind of got lost when I shifted focus to active interaction versus passive exploration, but I agree that reading with questions in mind is far superior to just reading the code to understand it generally.

Re: Nobody's just reading your code

#105

Post by [deleted] »

icebraining wrote: post #23
tobr wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always get an uneasy feeling when this is not (practically) possible. Whenever I add a dependency to a project I will at least skim through the source to get an idea of what it is I’m adding, and it pleases me a lot when a library is well written and self contained enough that this does not mostly leave me confused or overwhelmed. There’s a similar reason why I have such mixed feelings about some build tools and co…

The output of gcc and clang probably don't look much like hand-written machine code either, though. Or, for that matter, the output of V8 and SpiderMonkey. You can't avoid the compilers :)

[deleted]

Re: Nobody's just reading your code

#106

Post by lugg »

stenecdote wrote: post #102
jesperlang wrote: post #88

Reading code always felt awkward, slow and ineffective. The cognitive load is huge, you have to compute some things while memorizing others and at the same time keep track of flows. Thats why I always have pen and paper while diving into a new big code base, you simply can't keep it in your head. But something we forget often is... the goal of reading code is almost always to understand a system or some part of it. A…

As the author of the post, just wanted to reply and say I'm totally open to the notion that the solutions I proposed will not solve the problem. I'm much more sure about the problem than I am about the solution. A google maps zoom system for code sounds awesome, although I have no idea how that might work.

Brackets inline editor comes to mind. Just replace CSS definitions with function definitions (I think it might already do this for ?)

The zooming functionality you're thinking about probably wouldn't be very practical. (Zooming in down to opcode or out to high level framework calls.)

But simply being able to inspect definition inline would do.

Re: Nobody's just reading your code

#107

Post by stenecdote »

mannykannot wrote: post #83

I must disagree with this sentiment, though I understand where it is coming from: "Clean, solidified abstractions are like well-marked, easy-to-follow paths through a forest — very useful if they lead in the direction we need to go, but less useful when we want to blaze arbitrary new paths through the forest." Using the same analogy, if you want to blaze a new trail through the woods, you need a map of the territory,…

To push back on this point a little bit, I think we agree that a map is one of the most useful things you can have but disagree on what the right type of map is.

While I'm not anti-abstraction, I think people often impose poorly chosen high-level abstractions on top of messy lower-level components (akkartik calls this Authoritarian High Modernism in a comment (https://lobste.rs/s/gtxi5y/nobody_s_just_reading_your_code_h...) on Lobsters). This approach leaves readers having to understand a bad abstraction and its internals, a map, its territory, and inconsistencies between the two.

As I understand it (please correct me if I'm wrong), you want people to do the work to find better high-level abstractions. I agree that it would be good if we could do this more often. I just also think we can find other ways to give people maps that work with our existing, messy codebases that don't have good, minimal abstractions already.

Re: Nobody's just reading your code

#108

Post by djhworld »

The thing about code reading for me is you have to have decent tooling.

It's pointless reading code in Github, especially for a codebase you are not familiar with, you need to get the codebase open in an IDE to be able to dive in quickly and back again to build the map out in your head. I don't think you can read a portion of code from top to bottom without having tooling....unless the piece of code is really short and just one or two files

Re: Nobody's just reading your code

#109

Post by Cthulhu_ »

bsimpson wrote: post #2

One of the things that sets a good programmer apart is the willingness to fearlessly dig into someone else's code. I've heard it said before that you're responsible for every line of code you ship to your users. It follows that you shouldn't treat your dependencies as black boxes. Getting a stack trace that's 3 or 4 levels deep in Django/React/ ? Dig under the covers and understand what's happening. Include that info…

It's why (in theory) I love Go; as opposed to the JS hell as mentioned by another commenter, it has a lot more emphasis on consistency and, in a way, predictability, so there's less surprises and distractions (e.g. code style) when you browse other people's code. Also no "black box" dependencies (usually), you pull every lib from source and have it on your machine.

Re: Nobody's just reading your code

#110

Post by Cthulhu_ »

Klathmon wrote: post #80
alister wrote: post #67

Reading code just for fun was a thing in the early and mid years of UNIX (eg., 7th edition or System V). People eagerly passed around faint 10th generation photocopies of Lion's printout of and commentary[1] on the UNIX source code. The annual USENIX conference had a popular short course in which they went through the entire UNIX kernel line by line. Why was that a thing back then and not now? Certainly UNIX was an a…

This is still done today, just with other software. I've read blog posts that go through the entire redux javascript library line by line, or review an entire chunk of React. Even just yesterday here on HN was a submission that just contained shaders from Wolfenstein.

There's a category of articles out there nowadays that do "$library in $num lines of code", reducing popular libraries or frameworks down to their core - filtering out all the edge cases, so to speak. I've seen them for Angular, React, Redux, etc. I think that a lot of frameworks and libraries would do good to have a "core" codebase somewhere, something pure but unoptimized and without edge cases that are easily digestable, that explain the core idea of it.
Post reply on HN