131–140 of 418 posts
you guys have for loops?
At first, I thought it wasn't as readable, but now that I'm used to the syntax, I think it's much easier to parse what happening. I know what transformation is happening, and I know there shouldn't be any side-effects.
That first reply is so funny to me because it hits too close to home https://twitter.com/nice_byte/status/1466940940229046273 The more I do this, the more I gravitate towards the simple things.
Despite being a joke, I know it's the "Ha Ha Only Serious" [0] sort. I can't help but think this is severely biased by the trends of "enterprise software," where you eventually "give up", and clock your 9–5 writing if+for making a fine living, but erroneously pass that off as a mature, Jedi-like way of thinking about programming, like the meme suggests. (And, consequently, you spend no less time debugging hairy, nest…
How convenient that the software industry is about 40 years old. So these ideas should "break through" this invisible arbitrary corporate waiting area into the limelight any day now, right?
That first reply is so funny to me because it hits too close to home https://twitter.com/nice_byte/status/1466940940229046273 The more I do this, the more I gravitate towards the simple things.
Despite being a joke, I know it's the "Ha Ha Only Serious" [0] sort. I can't help but think this is severely biased by the trends of "enterprise software," where you eventually "give up", and clock your 9–5 writing if+for making a fine living, but erroneously pass that off as a mature, Jedi-like way of thinking about programming, like the meme suggests. (And, consequently, you spend no less time debugging hairy, nest…
There’s a joke in the fp community I can’t find right now that describes the evolution of programs from imperative side-effectful statements to a for comprehension, with exception catching, that looks nearly identical.
0 - http://www.willamette.edu/~fruehr/haskell/evolution.html?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ifs and fors are the easiest concepts to explain to non-developers, so it makes sense to start there. I wouldn't say that they are the standard now, but using and mastering all features in a language is hard. Add to that design patterns, classes and code layout it becomes a full-time job to keep up. I have been in contact with code most of my professional life, but still isn't comfortable writing large amounts of cod…
I agree that modern software development for non-full time developers is brutal, several of my data scientist colleagues are remarkably brilliant people and yet they struggle with some more advanced programming concepts. However, most of those features are relatively standard and are more conceptual than syntactical in nature. Bashing people because they don't know stuff is stupid and counterproductive, but I shouldn…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
yes, at the lowest level its binary code, 0 and 1
I like to think of myself, actually, as not a code writer, but an author. I just use zeros and ones instead of words 'cause words will let you down.
That first reply is so funny to me because it hits too close to home https://twitter.com/nice_byte/status/1466940940229046273 The more I do this, the more I gravitate towards the simple things.
Despite being a joke, I know it's the "Ha Ha Only Serious" [0] sort. I can't help but think this is severely biased by the trends of "enterprise software," where you eventually "give up", and clock your 9–5 writing if+for making a fine living, but erroneously pass that off as a mature, Jedi-like way of thinking about programming, like the meme suggests. (And, consequently, you spend no less time debugging hairy, nest…
For example, how do you handle authorization, logging, and how do you make the code maintainable? That's a really tough problem that requires a lot of thought about the overall system design.
And of course it's always a lie to say that performance and resource usage aren't a concern -- they're not a concern until they are.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> you eventually "give up", and clock your 9–5 writing if+for making a fine living, but erroneously pass that off as a mature This comment sure indicates to me where you most likely are on the curve. In all seriousness, I think this is considerably off the mark. After enough experience you realize that expressivity and convenience are antipatterns and don't actually simplify things but are harbingers of complexity, b…
Personally I disagree. We should be using state machines and pure functions. If+for loops are just what's easiest to express in the major languages of today. they are no more or less computationally expensive but due to lack of tooling they are often cheaper to write. In languages and libraries that allow FSM and pure functional kernel based designs you can get just as clear logic that is expressible not just to the…
If the project had instead been designed to have less unnecessary state and “transitions” it would have been a lot easier to make changes.
All those ideas sound good by themselves but they are really bad for “defensive” coding. Good luck selling a project to refactor something when it’s going to take multiple people-years. Once you’ve made the mistake of committing to an inflexible design it’s either that, replace/ignore the thing, or deal with low productivity as long as the thing exists.
That first reply is so funny to me because it hits too close to home https://twitter.com/nice_byte/status/1466940940229046273 The more I do this, the more I gravitate towards the simple things.
Intermediate developers, bitten by their past mistakes, decide to future proof their work. But they don’t just look one or two steps ahead, rather they try to look five steps ahead and identity problems that do not and may never exist. Consequently, they over-engineer, over-abstract, and over-complicate everything. Carmack’s recent “But here we are” speech resonated with me.
Advanced developers identify the right balance for each task between simple and complex, concrete and abstract, and pragmatic and idealistic. In my experience, they favor simple and pragmatic solutions, use abstraction effectively, and can satisfy near-term goals quickly without painting themselves into a corner. “As simple as possible, but not simpler.”
I try to avoid working for tech leads stuck in the second phase, which is not uncommon. If you suggest taking the “ifs and for loops” approach of solving a simple problem with a simple solution, they’ll assume you’re on the wrong side of the bell curve.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Despite being a joke, I know it's the "Ha Ha Only Serious" [0] sort. I can't help but think this is severely biased by the trends of "enterprise software," where you eventually "give up", and clock your 9–5 writing if+for making a fine living, but erroneously pass that off as a mature, Jedi-like way of thinking about programming, like the meme suggests. (And, consequently, you spend no less time debugging hairy, nest…
> you eventually "give up", and clock your 9–5 writing if+for making a fine living, but erroneously pass that off as a mature This comment sure indicates to me where you most likely are on the curve. In all seriousness, I think this is considerably off the mark. After enough experience you realize that expressivity and convenience are antipatterns and don't actually simplify things but are harbingers of complexity, b…
You could just as well say that ifs and for loops are just sugar for gotos and all programming is just gotos.
The reason ifs and for loops are used instead of gotos is that they are very useful abstractions that are easy to reason about and save the programmer lots of mental effort. But they are not the only such abstractions.
To the extent that other abstractions can create problems, it's not because they're really just sugar for ifs and for loops, it's because they are not well crafted abstractions so they are not easy to reason about and don't really save the programmer any mental effort. But there are plenty of abstractions other than ifs and for loops that are well crafted and do save the programmer mental effort, in many cases lots of it.