The Pragmatic Programmer, 20th Anniversary Edition • Hacker News Board

Re: The Pragmatic Programmer, 20th Anniversary Edition

#31

Post by ok_coo » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 5:38 PM UTC

jshowa3 wrote: post #29

nautilus12 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whats with companies constantly throwing people in the trenches and forcing them to be in constant maintanence mode all the time? I feel like they are just asking for burnout and turnover. If its that bad, give it to someone to greenfield some painful part of it rather than spend their life on the hamster wheel.

You'd be surprised how much companies operate in silos without any training, design, or planning. Most of the time, you're just throwing crap together at the last minute. Doing things without saying no.

Sink or swim is poor management, but if you're young, at your first tech job or haven't experienced anything better, how would you know?

My first dev job was so terrible, I almost quit this career entirely.

Re: The Pragmatic Programmer, 20th Anniversary Edition

#32

Post by agentultra » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 5:40 PM UTC

Why concurrency? And why advocate a particular solution? A good solution, in my experience, isn't any particular implementation: it's to think about it, really hard, using tools that help you think about hard things... like math. "Actors," is like... soy sauce.

However there were nuggets of gold in the original. Looking forward to finding the new bits and gems again.

Re: The Pragmatic Programmer, 20th Anniversary Edition

#33

Post by diminoten » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 5:52 PM UTC

milesvp wrote: post #17

There’s been a lot of love for this book, but I found the title to be jarring. When I was given the book to read, I was doing a lot of maintenance work, and was doing a lot of ‘duct tape and bailing wire’ kinds of fixes to keep the systems functional, while slowly addressing the root causes of downtime and issues. To me this was truly pragmatic programming, but nothing in the first few chapters even tries to deal wit…

The book isn't meant to be read front to back, the "most relevant" parts of the book for your situation aren't magically going to appear at the beginning.

Try reading it again, this time thinking of each chapter as its own, separate story.

Don't fall into the trap of "This is popular so I'm going to express criticism". If you want to, you can extract a great deal of wisdom from this book.

Re: The Pragmatic Programmer, 20th Anniversary Edition

#34

Post by anderspitman » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 5:55 PM UTC

tunnuz wrote: post #16

alasdair_ wrote: post #3

The original version of this book is something I'll always treasure. It sits next to "Code Complete", the Gang of Four's "Design Patterns" book and Martin Fowler's "Refactoring" on my top shelf and I still read parts of it every year.

Would you still recommend the original version? I have a printed copy and tried to read it ages ago, but gave up (it bore me). I am sure I'd appreciate it better now, but with a new edition coming out I'd be wondering whether I'm missing out.

When I first read it 5 years into my now 10 year programming career, it felt timeless. I've been meaning to reread it ever since. Curious what I would think now.

Re: The Pragmatic Programmer, 20th Anniversary Edition

#35

Post by slowhand09 » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 6:00 PM UTC

slowhand09 wrote: post #2

While your at it, please update "Pragmatic Project Automation".

I should elaborate. Excellent book by Mike Clark, under the Pragmatic Programmers umbrella. Based an Ant and Cruise control. An updated version using a modern stack would be awesome.

Re: The Pragmatic Programmer, 20th Anniversary Edition

#36

Post by diminoten » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 6:01 PM UTC

nautilus12 wrote: post #27

milesvp wrote: post #17

There’s been a lot of love for this book, but I found the title to be jarring. When I was given the book to read, I was doing a lot of maintenance work, and was doing a lot of ‘duct tape and bailing wire’ kinds of fixes to keep the systems functional, while slowly addressing the root causes of downtime and issues. To me this was truly pragmatic programming, but nothing in the first few chapters even tries to deal wit…

Whats with companies constantly throwing people in the trenches and forcing them to be in constant maintanence mode all the time? I feel like they are just asking for burnout and turnover. If its that bad, give it to someone to greenfield some painful part of it rather than spend their life on the hamster wheel.

Because companies like to make money, and they can't make money when systems fail.

If maintaining a codebase causes burnout, maybe software isn't for you.

Re: The Pragmatic Programmer, 20th Anniversary Edition

#37

Post by diminoten » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 6:02 PM UTC

prepend wrote: post #28

TeMPOraL wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think GP's point is that saying "you need to do X, Y, Z" in moderation" carries nearly zero bits of information. Of course I don't want to overdo or underdo something. But how much is too much? How much is too little? How do I know? And since code is something that accumulates over time, how do I maintain the balance? Answers to these questions is what's needed for coders to do a good job. The original book does en…

You’re lucky it’s intuitive for you. I think it’s valuable to have credible sources backing up my intuition because I’ve worked in orgs that document way too much and way too little. So just calling out a desire for just right documentation (with copious examples) is handy to me so that people don’t idealize no doc systems or spend half their time documenting.

The people who say, "This is all obvious" are often the people who understand the "obvious" the least.

Re: The Pragmatic Programmer, 20th Anniversary Edition

#38

Post by commandlinefan » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 6:05 PM UTC

tedunangst wrote: post #8

There's some good advice in the book, but I found the majority of it seems to be rather goldilocks flavored. Implement the features you need, but don't add too many, but don't omit important ones either. Write some documentation, but not too much or too little. Etc. You read it, and oh yes, very wise, but not really helpful? Not much here would be useful in resolving a dispute between two programmers, one who wants t…

> goldilocks flavored

Sadly true of far too many "influential" books. Although I did enjoy reading it, I finished it in an afternoon - if that's possible, it's probably not hiding any real deep wisdom.

Re: The Pragmatic Programmer, 20th Anniversary Edition

#39

Post by jkaptur » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 6:08 PM UTC

I was underwhelmed by this book. I think that so many of the practices (like version control) have become so popular that reading an argument for their use seems superfluous.

That also makes it really jarring when it recommends something that decidedly hasn't taken off, like the blackboard design pattern.

I had the same experience reading "The Design of Everyday Things". To some extent, these books seem most valuable as historical artifacts of what the tech world was like thirty years ago, rather than current references.

Re: The Pragmatic Programmer, 20th Anniversary Edition

#40

Post by commandlinefan » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 6:08 PM UTC

codesushi42 wrote: post #21

I... I don't know. I have never read this book. Ironically, I have read and enjoyed many books from PragProg. But this one always struck me as a "fufu" book, written around giving advice that one can independently reason and acquire during one's career. Am I wrong? Is this book worth reading if you already have many years of experience under your belt?

> Is this book worth reading

If you have a day to kill, it's an entertaining read, and if you're an experienced developer, you'll find yourself shaking your head or nodding along throughout. But it's mostly just entertaining, well-written anecdotes - there's not really that much to _learn_ there.