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Interview with Douglas Crockford

evrone.com

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Re: Interview with Douglas Crockford

#101

Post by tomgp »

saiojd wrote: post #86
tomgp wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my feeling was that Crockford’s ‘…good parts’ was intensely pragmatic. About as far away from the academic approach you’re describing as i can imagine. A bigger, multi paradigm language makes it harder to read other peoples code as the chances are higher that they’re employing a different paradigm or alter a different idiom, a clear maintenance burden.

Pragmistism literally means utility for problem solving. Who do you know solves problems using a Crockford-style subset of language features? Note that, no where did I argue that bloat is good. I only said that it was tolerable given that some new features are useful. Maintenance burden is a real problem, but is still tolerated in practice. I don't agree that subsetting a language is far from an academic approach. In…

Identifying that subset of the language was paradigm shift in JS development. around 2008 when the good parts came out i don’t know any serious JS developers who didn’t take on board many of its lessons. examples: avoiding ‘this’, understanding the value of functions as first class citizens, understanding closures. these weren’t unique to crockford but by presenting them in an accesible plain spoken way he moved the state of the language forward.

i do agree that there’s a need to weigh the value of new features vs bloat but id say 1 good feature in ten is pretty poor odds.

another example of crockfords pragmatism is JSON which for all its flaws has been a real boon.

edit: un-auto correcting “crockpot” :D

Re: Interview with Douglas Crockford

#102

Post by roguas »

eyelidlessness wrote: post #91
Scarbutt wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Immutability in JS is painful and tedious, how can you enjoy write functional code in JS?

I don’t find it painful or tedious. - Constructing flat POJO values is trivial (spread + define any changed properties). - Immutable array operations are fairly robust, albeit not as expressive as some may want. Getting comfortable with reduce improves this dramatically. - Map/Set constructors accept instances to create new values. - Class instances used as value types are simple to derive, assuming their constructor…

> You can take inspiration from Clojure

Famously Ramdajs on its front page has: we're not porting over all of the Clojure functions. To slow down this direction, for good reasons perhaps. Still its very visible that FP idioms travel nicely between langs/platforms.

Re: Interview with Douglas Crockford

#103

Post by theonething »

ipaddr wrote: post #89
lmarcos wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. I don't hate them (they last at most 10 min.), but as someone who has been working for more than 12 years in the industry I think managers/teams do daily stand-ups because of cargo cult.

Same here. I went looking for a non-standup job last month.. I didn't come across any.

My current company has one once a week which is tolerable. We're hiring, especially for FE developers if you're interested.

Re: Interview with Douglas Crockford

#104

Post by theonething »

lmarcos wrote: post #83
theonething wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. I've never experienced a place where standups added value (at least from my perspective.). Quite the opposite actually.

Same. I don't hate them (they last at most 10 min.), but as someone who has been working for more than 12 years in the industry I think managers/teams do daily stand-ups because of cargo cult.

It's a really boring 10 minutes though and it happens everyday. And it translates to more than 10 minutes of wasted time because of the context switch (and the added drudgery that can affect morale)

Re: Interview with Douglas Crockford

#105

Post by saiojd »

tomgp wrote: post #101
saiojd wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pragmistism literally means utility for problem solving. Who do you know solves problems using a Crockford-style subset of language features? Note that, no where did I argue that bloat is good. I only said that it was tolerable given that some new features are useful. Maintenance burden is a real problem, but is still tolerated in practice. I don't agree that subsetting a language is far from an academic approach. In…

Identifying that subset of the language was paradigm shift in JS development. around 2008 when the good parts came out i don’t know any serious JS developers who didn’t take on board many of its lessons. examples: avoiding ‘this’, understanding the value of functions as first class citizens, understanding closures. these weren’t unique to crockford but by presenting them in an accesible plain spoken way he moved the…

Interesting points, thank you! JSON is a great example, I understand what you meant now.

That being said, I really wish JSON had comments :P

Re: Interview with Douglas Crockford

#107

Post by tomcam »

mikehall314 wrote: post #12
binkHN wrote: post #10

I thought this part was rather interesting: > Evrone: You spread the idea that developers should read each other's code regularly… > Douglas: In filmmaking, there is a time in the morning called "dailies", when the previous day's footage is examined. It looks like everyone is just sitting around watching movies and wasting time, but it is critically important in finding problems early and assuring the quality of the…

We tried this in a team a few years ago, and the problem we faced was developers literally falling asleep during readings. We found that the Team wasn't really engaging with the process and instead just tuned out until it was their turn. That doesn't mean I think Crockford's "Dailies" model is a poor one, it's just one issue to be aware of. Though I often find the same in Scrum teams. Folks aren't listening, they're…

> Folks aren't listening, they're just waiting for their turn to speak.

That statement works in so many contexts

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