191–200 of 418 posts
"First a punch is just a punch, Then a punch is not only a punch, And finally a punch is just a punch" (heard from Bruce Lee) Basically it means that in the beginning we punch like we can.. then a martial arts student learns the proper and different ways to punch.. so a punch is no longer just a punch... Is a lot of instructions.. Then to sheer practice and repetition the right way to punch becomes second nature.. so…
"First a punch is just a punch, Then a punch is not only a punch, And finally a punch is just a punch" (heard from Bruce Lee) Basically it means that in the beginning we punch like we can.. then a martial arts student learns the proper and different ways to punch.. so a punch is no longer just a punch... Is a lot of instructions.. Then to sheer practice and repetition the right way to punch becomes second nature.. so…
Everything else is only there for the monkeys pressing the keys.
Coding is basically just ifs and for loops.. But software engineering (or development) is much more than just coding.
Isn't software engineering pretty much ifs and loops too? Massively complicated ifs, and looping pretty much samething over and over again.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> We should be using state machines and pure functions. For problems where those are the right tools, sure. But they aren't the right tools for all problems any more than ifs and for loops are.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really, there are no if+for, just compare and jump. Why don't we use what the metal uses, instead of these "expressive abstractions"? If+for have no deeper foundational significance in the construction of programs or computations, literally, than say a lambda function. But because the latter is unfamiliar, it's spoken about in the same manner you present: as if it is some highly abstract, complicating, high-level fea…
> Why don't we use what the metal uses, instead of these "expressive abstractions"? Because the "expressive abstractions" are much easier to reason about and save programmers lots of mental effort. And, as I have commented upthread, ifs and for loops are by no means the only such abstractions. > because the latter is unfamiliar, it's spoken about in the same manner you present: as if it is some highly abstract, compl…
We now have a chicken-egg problem. I can freely admit that for+if is easy for programmers to understand solely because of how we are educated, and not due to any Bruce Lee hocus pocus about simplicity or fundamentalism, as so many others here suggest.
A programmer who, say, learned from SICP first would find a for loop awkward and bizarre when you could "just" tail-recurse.
"First a punch is just a punch, Then a punch is not only a punch, And finally a punch is just a punch" (heard from Bruce Lee) Basically it means that in the beginning we punch like we can.. then a martial arts student learns the proper and different ways to punch.. so a punch is no longer just a punch... Is a lot of instructions.. Then to sheer practice and repetition the right way to punch becomes second nature.. so…
I started off writing a lot of 68000 machine code. I was always amazed what you could accomplish with a lot of loops and branches. I never lost that sense that at whatever higher level I was at later on, it was all loops and branches.
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.
New developers write simple but shortsighted code. It gets the job done, but it will be painful to work with in the future. 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-co…
Debated for a long time whether that methodology was stuck in the second phase or if it was actually the third. Still don't have an answer, but these days I think having a plan is better than just letting engineers run roughshod, as long as the conventions are easy to follow.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
In a very real way, it's all conditional jumps in assembly, and every thing you've learned to make programming easier by allowing more directly letting you express your high level intent is just sugar. It might even help some or most of the time. But what you're actually doing is creating a bunch of branches and loops, and as much as the high level stuff might help, you really shouldn't forget this is the medium you…
I disagree with how your use of "just" here. It's common for programmers to dismiss the importance of syntax but syntax and notation are the interface and UX between the language semantics and your brain. It's no less important to get this right. There's a half-joke that Europe was able to rapidly advance in Calculus beyond Britain due to the superiority of Leibniz notation.
> healthy respect for their base materials
What's unique about computers is the theoretical guarantee that the base does not matter. Whether by lambda calculus, register machines or swarms of soldier crabs running from birds in specially designed enclosures, we're fine as long as we appropriately encode our instructions.
> bunch of branches and loops
You could also easily say it's just a bunch of state machines. We outsource tedious complexity and fine details to compiler abstractions. They track things for us that have analogues in logical deduction so that as long we follow their restrictions, we get a few guarantees. When say, writing asynchronous non-deterministic distributed programs, you'll need all the help you can get.
Even designing close to the machine (which most programs will not need) by paying attention to cache use, memory layout, branch divergence or using SIMD remain within the realm of abstractions.
As a senior software engineer i had to spend a lot of time at night fixing code written by junior devs and interns.
the code that company and devs (just ifs and loops gang) proud of was a pain in the ass for me so i quit the job entirly and do freelancing these days.
I tried to explain how something was wrong and why but no one would listen all believe they were 10x developers, Life lesson learned, never ever try to correct an idiot.
Here are some of the practices they followed * No indexes on tables, not even unique * No DRY, NO KISS * Switching to new shiny framework/library every week * no tests * Keeping entire codebase in a single file (4k LOC) * no versioning * Exposing DB credentials to the entire internet and not acting when being warned