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“Coding is basically just ifs and for loops.”

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Re: “Coding is basically just ifs and for loops.”

#341

Post by Jensson »

feoren wrote: post #319
xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #91

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…

> Saying it is all ifs and for-loops is completely true. Everything else, all the abstractions and high level features, are just sugar You sound like the kind of person who thinks the ancient Greeks figured out all of math and everything that has happened since then is just fancy abstractions and sugar. Either software engineering can advance as a discipline, or it can't. You seem to be assuming it can't. > This comm…

Math today does a lot of things you couldn't do with math back then. It isn't just syntactic sugar, there were simply lots of problems they didn't know how to solve since the math they had wasn't powerful enough to solve it. Calculus for example solved a lot of problems they have, and calculus isn't syntactic sugar for anything, it is a new instruction set.

However the code abstractions people used 50 years ago could still implement all programs we have today. We added a lot of sugar on top, but the core of coding remained the same. For example, you could implement Map, Reduce etc in C, they are just functions and not novel features of programming.

Re: “Coding is basically just ifs and for loops.”

#343

Post by tambourine_man »

bradrn wrote: post #297
tambourine_man wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Programming alone vs programming in a team are very, very different occupations. A lot of what applies to one doesn’t apply to the other. I’m still painfully learning this, after all these years.

Could you elaborate please?

I have much more experience working alone, but: git alone is a breeze. I don’t need to impose myself some arbitrary constrain because I know (or think I do) I won’t abuse it. I can use the stack I consider best/am more productive on, instead of what’s fashionable this year. No linting, coding conventions, etc. Just the pure joy of problem solving.

On the other hand, on the right conditions, the amount you learn on a good team is ridiculous compared to what you’d do alone. Weeks vs years kind of thing.

Re: “Coding is basically just ifs and for loops.”

#344

Post by pdonis »

reikonomusha wrote: post #196
pdonis wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I'm not suggesting people "express programs in the lambda calculus", but instead that incorporating a philosophy of functions and their composition is not at all a bizarre concept. Loops and ifs work miserably with any hierarchical data, compared to recursion, for example. A lot of the world's data is hierarchical. We now have a chicken-egg problem. I can freely admit that for+if is easy for programmers to understand…

> incorporating a philosophy of functions and their composition is not at all a bizarre concept

Sure, functions and their composition are very often another highly useful abstraction that is easy to reason about and saves the programmer a lot of mental effort.

> We now have a chicken-egg problem.

No, just a recognition, which was not there in the original claim, that ifs and for loops are not the only useful abstractions.

> A programmer who, say, learned from SICP first would find a for loop awkward and bizarre when you could "just" tail-recurse.

Perhaps, but I think such a programmer who needed his code to be readable and understandable by a lot of other people in a large project would end up inventing a "for-loop" macro or something similar that, while it might use tail recursion under the hood, would express the construct in a way that programmers could understand regardless of how they learned programming.

Re: “Coding is basically just ifs and for loops.”

#345

Post by throwamon »

gnuvince wrote: post #233

In my twenties, I wanted to use all the cool PL techniques: meta-programming, reflection, monads, macros, type-level programming, etc. I'm getting older and now I want my programs to be 90–95% functions, arrays, structs, enums, and loops and only parsimoniously throw in more advanced language features.

So I hear you want Clojure.

Re: “Coding is basically just ifs and for loops.”

#346

Post by angelzen »

laurent92 wrote: post #229
elviejo wrote: post #164

"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…

That’s what disappoints me in modern Java. There is practically no ifs. It makes it inaccessible to beginners on the project, and the streams are about twice as slow… just because devs think they are more clever if they pile 7 “.map()” to transform a list. list.stream().filter(Objects::nonNull).map(User::getUsername).filter(Objects::nonNull).filter(name -> name.contains(searchString)).map(name -> “We have found your…

Coding is values, arrays, dicts, ifs, loops and functions. An expressive set-like operations library over arrays (& dicts) gives superpowers.

Re: “Coding is basically just ifs and for loops.”

#347

Post by justicezyx »

elviejo wrote: post #164

"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…

“参禅之初，看山是山，看水是水；禅有悟时，看山不是山，看水不是水；禅中彻悟，看山仍然山，看水仍然是水。”

These are all from the Zen philosphy, it says:

When getting start with Zen, I see hill as hill, water as water When get experienced with Zen, I see hill as more than hill, water as more than water. When finally got mature with Zen, I once again see hill as hill, and water as water.

Re: “Coding is basically just ifs and for loops.”

#348

Post by salawat »

filoeleven wrote: post #307
nayuki wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JavaScript's "first()" is https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe... .

Same caveat applies here as my other sibling comment. I shouldn’t have to do null checks before calling functions.

I shouldn't have to QA properly written code.

Alas, reality, she is a cruel mistress.

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