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How A Pull Request Rocked My World

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Re: How A Pull Request Rocked My World

#111

Post by greghinch »

Xcelerate wrote: post #38

Reading the comments in this thread is very interesting to me, because each programmer seems certain of the superiority of his own programming style. We have some comments that disparage the change, saying that it obfuscates the code and makes it more difficult to understand. We have others saying that this change is a basic technique and it's "shocking" that the author wrote a book without this simple knowledge. Wha…

Something that I've come to realize only in the last couple of years: most programming arguments revolve around personal preference. There are of course optimizations that can be made to actually improve machine performance; these can be found reasonably simply through profiling. At the end of the day, most arguments revolve around "style".

It's actually a very tricky subject. If you're working on SMe apps, including startups, most often a given project'style will flow from the lead (or the person/people who initiated the project). They may be good, they may be bad. Invariably, less experienced developers are hired and learn Ro code following this style. Eventually, those less experienced developers become experienced, and leave to persue other projects. And they take that style with them.

Depending on the role they have, there is likely still a lead above them. And this is where the arguments begin. The lead had his/her style. The new dev has experience with another style, and it may or may not mesh with the new lead's style.

And so the problem perpetuates.

It can be very difficult to work with those devs in the early-middle stage of their career. If they are good people, they learn to be flexible, adopt the best parts of all the styles they are exposed to, and eventually become great leads. But many will not, are confrontational, and ultimately poisonous to the teams they are on.

If I can quote my favorite philosopher, Ted "Theodore" Logan: "if the only true wisdom lies in knowing, then you know nothing"

Re: How A Pull Request Rocked My World

#112

Post by gruseom »

robbles wrote: post #104

Can you imagine how much more pleasant participating in HN, GitHub, etc. would be if all programmers were this pleasant and open-minded? Regardless of the particular merits of the technique he talks about here, I think we can all learn a lesson from this guy about appreciating the work and ideas of others.

I couldn't agree more. The ability to appreciate others' work is a sign of intelligence.

Re: How A Pull Request Rocked My World

#113

Post by spc476 »

moultano wrote: post #105
bthomas wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The nature of programming is that any consensus solution can be automated. That's a good thing.

I'm always amazed though the extent to which that isn't followed through on. Consider the code for logging in and storing user credentials. The level of collaboration on this is at the level of a list of best practices. Why are we still letting anyone (re)write this code?

Okay, how do you use /bin/login over HTTP?

Situations change. So do languages. I hope you can find an Algol compiler, but not Algol-68---that's too new for this code.

Re: How A Pull Request Rocked My World

#115

Post by mylittlepony »

tjr wrote: post #106
mylittlepony wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A lot of programmers are insecure. You mean a lot of persons? If you don't, I wonder where you got this from. Personal experience maybe? Anecdotic: I have always been good at sports, popular, and confident, and I criticized this article because he used a kind of link-bait title (should have been "Today I learned about inheritance and it's awesome", something like that), and he also turned out to be selling programm…

So he didn't know some aspect of polymorphism. Is that pertinent to his book? It's not as if using if/else constructs is bad or wrong. In some fields of development it would be preferred, for blatant clarity. Does it follow that his book is bad or wrong because it was not written with understanding of this aspect of polymorphism?

"You can reuse code with inheritance. Absolutely crazy. Brilliant.

All of this blew me away."

Re: How A Pull Request Rocked My World

#116

Post by instakill »

Xcelerate wrote: post #38

Reading the comments in this thread is very interesting to me, because each programmer seems certain of the superiority of his own programming style. We have some comments that disparage the change, saying that it obfuscates the code and makes it more difficult to understand. We have others saying that this change is a basic technique and it's "shocking" that the author wrote a book without this simple knowledge. Wha…

I knew the comments were going to be exactly as you described before I clicked the comments link (and had this in mind http://xkcd.com/1053/) and I'm really glad your comment is on top and visible for everyone to digest before they start handing out their own judgements.

Re: How A Pull Request Rocked My World

#117

Post by anu_gupta »

mylittlepony wrote: post #93
ams6110 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of programmers are insecure. They were the nerds in school, not popular, not good at sports, etc. Programming is the one thing they can do where they feel in control, and confident. So they naturally tend to be defensive about it.

> A lot of programmers are insecure. You mean a lot of persons? If you don't, I wonder where you got this from. Personal experience maybe? Anecdotic: I have always been good at sports, popular, and confident, and I criticized this article because he used a kind of link-bait title (should have been "Today I learned about inheritance and it's awesome", something like that), and he also turned out to be selling programm…

> Anecdotic: I have always been good at sports, popular, and confident,

I'm fairly certain this is a lie, given the way you've presented yourself in this thread.

Re: How A Pull Request Rocked My World

#118

Post by AYBABTME »

dakimov wrote: post #64
AlexeyBrin wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 for Good programming is not an objective concept.

== Programming sucks nowadays. There is not even a consensus on what is good in programming! Take a look at other professional cultures: people work extremely hard to develop the skills that everybody else in their profession have. What does a software developer do? Whatever they like on their own, there is no professional culture whatsoever: "Don't give a crap about the humankind's experience, I'll invent everything…

There's stuff to rely on, it's just that mostly nobody wants to spend the time reading it.

Re: How A Pull Request Rocked My World

#119

Post by mylittlepony »

anu_gupta wrote: post #117
mylittlepony wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A lot of programmers are insecure. You mean a lot of persons? If you don't, I wonder where you got this from. Personal experience maybe? Anecdotic: I have always been good at sports, popular, and confident, and I criticized this article because he used a kind of link-bait title (should have been "Today I learned about inheritance and it's awesome", something like that), and he also turned out to be selling programm…

> Anecdotic: I have always been good at sports, popular, and confident, I'm fairly certain this is a lie, given the way you've presented yourself in this thread.

I'm fairly certain you don't think it's a lie, and you are just envious.

Either way, I don't see how any of this matters. I explained why I criticized the guy, and instead of working on that, you tried to undermine the anecdotal part.

Re: How A Pull Request Rocked My World

#120

Post by stiff »

greghinch wrote: post #111
Xcelerate wrote: post #38

Reading the comments in this thread is very interesting to me, because each programmer seems certain of the superiority of his own programming style. We have some comments that disparage the change, saying that it obfuscates the code and makes it more difficult to understand. We have others saying that this change is a basic technique and it's "shocking" that the author wrote a book without this simple knowledge. Wha…

Something that I've come to realize only in the last couple of years: most programming arguments revolve around personal preference. There are of course optimizations that can be made to actually improve machine performance; these can be found reasonably simply through profiling. At the end of the day, most arguments revolve around "style". It's actually a very tricky subject. If you're working on SMe apps, including…

A programming argument that can be convincingly shown to be only a matter of personal preference is irrelevant, but I strongly disagree those are that common. Various programming language constructs have various properties and if you had the opportunity to maintain a single project for some 5-10 years, to experiment with different implementations of same functionalities etc. you learn that certain techniques prevent problems and certain others provoke them.

Look at the writing of Joshua Bloch based on his experience with designing the Java standard libraries, you will find plenty of arguments that you could think are about "style", but in fact he always includes a very detailed and concrete discussion about why one way is superior to the other. Similarly with some of the articles of John Carmack from idSoftware. For me the revelation was that there is indeed no such thing as "style" so that some techniques are just "prettier" than the others, it is all a matter of consequences a given implementation has for other developers using the code and for its maintainers.

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