It’s all just strings. Make the right strings happen in the right place and the computer does things.
“Coding is basically just ifs and for loops.”
211–220 of 418 posts
Re: “Coding is basically just ifs and for loops.”
#212"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.
Yes, one of my early jobs was writing Z80 code and I have the same sense.
Re: “Coding is basically just ifs and for loops.”
#213Reminds me of a coworker who said that they only data structure you need is an array since it can be used to to mimic every other data type.
Re: “Coding is basically just ifs and for loops.”
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
And that's also why a lot of Architecture Astronaut that looooved Java, didn't see Python coming.
Funny, I took over a modern python service and I was pretty shocked at what I inherited. Long gone are the days of "There's one way to do things".
Instead, this thing would give the most "enterprisey" Spring JEE application a run for its money with its endless annotations, dependency injection magic, all sorts of pseudo-types - both the "built-in" Python 3 ones like Set and List, but also the libraries like Pydantic. But unlike Java, these types aren't even really guaranteed by the language at compile time, so even if your IDE plugin can successfully detect them, things will still (silently) slip through at runtime.
The async functionality that's been bolted on to the language is worse than even the old and confusing Java multi-threading primitives, and the funny thing is it still doesn't actually run things in multiple threads. For that, your simple Rest API is running on layers of C programs like Uvicorn which itself is then wrapped by another few processes running Gunicorn which in turn is probably running behind NGINX. LOL, and we thought the Servlet stuff with Tomcat and JBoss was clunky - this is insane.
To be honest, if there ever was a sweet spot for Python, it would have been for smaller code bases that weren't complex enough for big "enterprisey" langs like .Net or Java, but were more permanent and complex than shell scripts or (back in the day) Perl could handle.
But nowadays, I don't think modern Python fits any use case real well. It's still dynamically typed, slow, single-threaded, and has a poorly managed ecosystem and hodge-podge of tools like virtualenv, pyenv, poetry, etc. that never quite become standardized and stable.
So unless you've got a bunch of Python experts who aren't interested in moving to a better lang, I'd find it hard to go with Python for new projects.
Re: “Coding is basically just ifs and for loops.”
#215"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…
Coding is not "ifs and loops, then $foo". That's a false premise. If you want to be fundamentalist about it (which I don't advise), a CPU is just a state machine. assembly instruction + machine state => new machine state Our idea of "jumping around code" and "control flow", as in for loops or if statements, are themselves abstractions of control state (an instruction pointer) and data state (perhaps a CPU register).…
Oh, but CPU instructions can be built up from a series of μops which are then executed out of order or in an overlapping fashion, making both "instruction" and "state" boundaries in your equation more fuzzy than it looks. So at the absolute-absolute bottom of "code", it is instructions for an abstract model of an interpretative device.
Re: “Coding is basically just ifs and for loops.”
#216His mind will be blown to lean it all runs on protons, neutron, and electrons.
Re: “Coding is basically just ifs and for loops.”
#217Coding is basically just ifs and while loops.
Re: “Coding is basically just ifs and for loops.”
#218Earlier 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…
> 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 my experience programming programming with primitives and basic flow control operations frequently tends to be at least be order of magnitude fast…
At least in the C++ space, stuff like boost-sml is able to produce assembly that is often as fast or occasionally faster than handwritten if or switch based FSM logic.
Re: “Coding is basically just ifs and for loops.”
#219That 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.
I'm may be biased because I spent too much time arguing about this
but you hear those $fancy_principles / fp / hard oop / "clean code" evangelists, and then you go to any repo of real world software - linux, compilers, kubernetes, git, blablabla and everywhere you see for loops, goto, ladders of if statements
Re: “Coding is basically just ifs and for loops.”
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
Coding is not "ifs and loops, then $foo". That's a false premise. If you want to be fundamentalist about it (which I don't advise), a CPU is just a state machine. assembly instruction + machine state => new machine state Our idea of "jumping around code" and "control flow", as in for loops or if statements, are themselves abstractions of control state (an instruction pointer) and data state (perhaps a CPU register).…
Oh, but CPU instructions can be built up from a series of μops which are then executed out of order or in an overlapping fashion, making both "instruction" and "state" boundaries in your equation more fuzzy than it looks. So at the absolute-absolute bottom of "code", it is instructions for an abstract model of an interpretative device.
(I'm not sure if your "but" is a retort, or an addendum. Assuming retort...) We can consider one more level of implementation machinery, but I fail to understand how uops aren't another form of instruction, and CPU internal gobbledygook like register files, caches, etc. aren't another form of state. It doesn't seem so fuzzy.