171–180 of 647 posts
As much as I like the style where the code logic is commented very thoroughly, it also falls in the trap of comments no longer matching the current code, I assume some variable renaming happened. In the function (line 320 of https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/blob/ec2e767e593953... ) func (ctrl *PersistentVolumeController) syncUnboundClaim(claim *v1.PersistentVolumeClaim) error { the variable "pvc" seems to hav…
"it became clear that we needed to ensure that every single condition was handled and accounted for in the code" This is a feature of several (mostly functional) programming languages, e.g. Haskell. Fun to see that often people figure out that these types of concepts are a smart way to write your code. Too bad it usually means many people reinvent the wheel instead of learning about computer science history and other…
I know a business coach who regularly asks his audience "Who here makes better burgers than McDonalds?". When half the audience raises their hand, he asks them why they don't outsell this giant company. Functional programming advocats, especially for the "pure" ones like Haskell, always strike me as odd. It seems that all the beauty of those languages make people obsess over that beauty and purity while keeping them…
Furthermore, why are you using the user interface as a yard-stick to judge language paradigms with?
This code reminds me of why ML-like languages with Maybe-style types and case expressions that generate compiler errors for missed alternatives are good. I bet rewriting this in OCaml or Haskell would lead to tighter code and might even unearth a couple possible states that haven't been accounted for.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Now i'm squarely in frontend web-app development right now which definitely changes things (mainly the complexity is centered around enabling fast changes/additions to the codebase, and not the actual business logic for the most part), but while "deep functionality and small interfaces" sounds good on paper, most of the time giant files with a few functions exported aren't a good way to manage that. Sure, it solves t…
> Having everything in one file like this without breaking it into "sub modules" for various parts of the module means that you need to almost have a complete understanding of the module before working on it. There's a balance to be struck here; you want to minimize the size of the code a developer has to understand to work on (or with) a given abstraction, but you don't want to split beyond that point, as it only ma…
Ignoring the initial boilerplate (license, imports) and the request to preserve the verbose ("space shuttle") style, the first line is: // Design: // // [... 4 paragraphs of English prose // explaining goals and intent... ] That's exactly the type of comment that should be at the beginning of most files!
As a novice programmer, I was absolutely stunned that this was not standard practice. A typical source file provides zero context, background on the subject, pointers to reference material/blog posts/books explaining the concepts, information on how it fits into the program's 'bigger picture', or (most importantly) the thought process that resulted in the file (i.e., why the choice was made to do _this_ rather than _…
I think this type of summary should not be per source file but per package/folder/module/project. A high-level developer overview with sufficient depth will also help stop repetition of philosophy in subsequent files.
In this case, I do agree with its existence though because of both the length and complexity of the file. For many files, neither are the case.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know a business coach who regularly asks his audience "Who here makes better burgers than McDonalds?". When half the audience raises their hand, he asks them why they don't outsell this giant company. Functional programming advocats, especially for the "pure" ones like Haskell, always strike me as odd. It seems that all the beauty of those languages make people obsess over that beauty and purity while keeping them…
They don't really make a 'product' but Jane Street uses Ocaml for all their development.
I'd like to see Uncle Bob do a point-by-point critique of this... "piece of work"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The most useful product in Haskell for me personally is pandoc the universal document converter. https://pandoc.org
While I ashamedly admit to having using pandoc myself already (it's been a while, but it wasn't even a bad experience), to me it still feels a little bit odd that this relatively obscure document converter is already the most famous product in a language I see hyped in every second HN thread.
"it became clear that we needed to ensure that every single condition was handled and accounted for in the code" This is a feature of several (mostly functional) programming languages, e.g. Haskell. Fun to see that often people figure out that these types of concepts are a smart way to write your code. Too bad it usually means many people reinvent the wheel instead of learning about computer science history and other…
Why do you say Haskell is an example of this? You can return undefined for anything, and have incomplete pattern matching, where if you don't mention a particular case, there is a runtime crash. An example would be head, which takes the first element of a list and throws an error on an empty list. I really love Haskell but it seems as if they are going for something different here than what Haskell provides.
That said, Haskell still isn't actually an example, chiefly because exceptions can be thrown by any code, and are reasonably often used in practice.
I love this! It's the "jazz music" of software development. Something which breaks all the "rules" but does so purposefully and explicitly so that it can become better than the "rules" allow. A naive look at this and my head is screaming that this file is way too big, has way too many branches and nested if statements, has a lot of "pointless comments" that just describe what the line or few lines around it is doing,…
I warned him at the beginning that he needed to spend a couple of hours wrapping his head around the code before trying to modify it.
I warned him that the code arrived at its current state after long and painful experience.
I warned him that other developers had worked on the code, had exactly his initial reaction, and eventually admitted they couldn't find a way to improve it.
I warned him, after he confidently declared that it just needed to be "more object-oriented," that I had written a lot of object-oriented code, was open to writing it in an object-oriented style if it would improve things, and could not think of any way to do so that would not make things worse.
But he could not even bring himself to read the existing code. He never did. He worked on it for three weeks, wrote thousands of lines of code, and even tried to deploy his own version without ever spending a single contiguous, focused, hour-long block of time reading the existing code. He was "refactoring" the whole time.
The code he produced was exactly how you imagine it. The code went from several hundred lines in a single file with no classes (just a containing class acting basically as a namespace) to thousands of lines scattered over half a dozen files with at least that many classes. The guy kept adding classes and kept adding test after test after test. He couldn't get his code to pass the test cases I had written, so several times he declared that my test cases were wrong and changed or removed assertions. He also claimed that the existing code couldn't "pass" his tests because he had hundreds of lines of tests for components that only existed in his code. According to him, this proved that there was a ton of "hidden untested functionality" in the existing code, which was therefore "dangerous."
I was pretty busy with other things, and this was his project now, so if he had been a little bit more clever he probably could have made his abomination stable enough to replace the existing version over my objections. Thankfully it was never good enough to survive in production.