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Nobody's just reading your code

akkartik.name

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Re: Nobody's just reading your code

#41

Post by gaius »

hinkley wrote: post #16
panic wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's one thing that bothers me about modern Electron-style apps which depend on an entire web rendering engine -- actually digging through all the dependencies to track down a bug can be almost impossible. For example, I was hitting a bug in an Electron app a while back and wanted to track it down. I got the app building with a locally-built version of Electron, but it became clear the real bug involved Chromium's…

I don’t think Library designers have adapted yet to a library heavy world. We still write them like we are using dozens but we have hundreds. Every library demands a fraction of our attention greater than its relative fraction of the code. Complex calling conventions, deep call stacks. Why am I even using a single purpose library with multiple levels of abstraction in it? At this point a library should BE the abstrac…

I don’t think Library designers have adapted yet to a library heavy world. We still write them like we are using dozens but we have hundreds.

The other day I was debugging an app that - no joke - pulled in 600M of libraries that were all so it could use one file parsing function that could have been re-implemented in <100 lines. Crazy!

Re: Nobody's just reading your code

#42

Post by icebraining »

taeric wrote: post #13
bsimpson wrote: post #2

One of the things that sets a good programmer apart is the willingness to fearlessly dig into someone else's code. I've heard it said before that you're responsible for every line of code you ship to your users. It follows that you shouldn't treat your dependencies as black boxes. Getting a stack trace that's 3 or 4 levels deep in Django/React/ ? Dig under the covers and understand what's happening. Include that info…

Don't let survivorship and confirmation bias cloud your judgment. What sets many successful people apart is not any one thing, but that they were successful. Many are willing to dive into other people's code in methods that are far deeper than I can comprehend, and yet they have failed at whatever task they were going about. So, yes. By and large, you shouldn't stop at your dependency boundaries. However, your job is…

Forking is not that bad, unless upstream has a lot of activity yet takes a long time to accept patches. Many projects are mostly dormant, so keeping a patchset and occasionally rebasing is easy enough.

We use git-aggregator[1] for easily applying pending PRs/MRs over the upstream branch, and for the most part, conflicts are rare.

[1] https://pypi.python.org/pypi/git-aggregator

Re: Nobody's just reading your code

#43

Post by geezerjay »

bsimpson wrote: post #2

One of the things that sets a good programmer apart is the willingness to fearlessly dig into someone else's code. I've heard it said before that you're responsible for every line of code you ship to your users. It follows that you shouldn't treat your dependencies as black boxes. Getting a stack trace that's 3 or 4 levels deep in Django/React/ ? Dig under the covers and understand what's happening. Include that info…

I agree with the spirit but in practice more often than not that's a complete waste of time and energy, unless you're trying to figure out the cause of a specific bug when you've already excluded your code as its source.

Re: Nobody's just reading your code

#44

Post by lawn »

bsimpson wrote: post #2

One of the things that sets a good programmer apart is the willingness to fearlessly dig into someone else's code. I've heard it said before that you're responsible for every line of code you ship to your users. It follows that you shouldn't treat your dependencies as black boxes. Getting a stack trace that's 3 or 4 levels deep in Django/React/ ? Dig under the covers and understand what's happening. Include that info…

To be sure.

There's also a trade off to doing it too much as the time it can take to really go deep can effectively paralyze the development.

You need to be able to properly use abstraction layers and be able to treat code as black boxes when needed, you only need sufficient knowledge to work with a system. Of course we shouldn't stop until we reach that level and too often developers give up. But it's also common, especially for very skilled or perfectionist developers, to go too far.

Re: Nobody's just reading your code

#45

Post by henesy »

mjevans wrote: post #21

One of the reasons I love golang* is how the entire source code for the standard library is just a few easy clicks away from the documentation on how to use it. As an example: When I want to do something and the interfaces I'm seeing provide friction (XML parsing not /quite/ handling normal, slightly incorrect, HTML) I can get a better idea of what the library is doing behind the scenes. I got an example of how to us…

Being able to browse the Go source so easily and clearly is a fantastic way to both learn and grow in understanding of the language. It's definitely helped me as I've learned and written in Go over the years.

Re: Nobody's just reading your code

#46

Post by dingo_bat »

curtis wrote: post #6
bsimpson wrote: post #2

One of the things that sets a good programmer apart is the willingness to fearlessly dig into someone else's code. I've heard it said before that you're responsible for every line of code you ship to your users. It follows that you shouldn't treat your dependencies as black boxes. Getting a stack trace that's 3 or 4 levels deep in Django/React/ ? Dig under the covers and understand what's happening. Include that info…

> ... willingness to fearlessly dig into someone else's code. I've done this many times. The problem is that it takes a lot of time, and there's no way you can dig through more than a fraction of a large codebase. You gotta pick your battles.

Also, when you're using 3rd party proprietary code, you don't get the option of fixing it. So delving into it can feel silly.

Re: Nobody's just reading your code

#47

Post by henesy »

One of the best parts of the Plan 9 system is that all of the kernel/command/library source is on hand and readily available to consult at any given time.

Jointly, an important detail is that the complexity of said source is kept to a sane minimum and general style trends mean that most, if not all, of the source is formatted similarly and legibly. The system is so compact that you can keep most of the system source in your head at one time if you really need to.

Re: Nobody's just reading your code

#48

Post by sanxiyn »

taeric wrote: post #13
bsimpson wrote: post #2

One of the things that sets a good programmer apart is the willingness to fearlessly dig into someone else's code. I've heard it said before that you're responsible for every line of code you ship to your users. It follows that you shouldn't treat your dependencies as black boxes. Getting a stack trace that's 3 or 4 levels deep in Django/React/ ? Dig under the covers and understand what's happening. Include that info…

Don't let survivorship and confirmation bias cloud your judgment. What sets many successful people apart is not any one thing, but that they were successful. Many are willing to dive into other people's code in methods that are far deeper than I can comprehend, and yet they have failed at whatever task they were going about. So, yes. By and large, you shouldn't stop at your dependency boundaries. However, your job is…

Forking is perfectly doable. Rust project forks LLVM, adds patches, and forward ports them when upgrading LLVM version. It's manageable.

Re: Nobody's just reading your code

#49

Post by henesy »

henesy wrote: post #47

One of the best parts of the Plan 9 system is that all of the kernel/command/library source is on hand and readily available to consult at any given time. Jointly, an important detail is that the complexity of said source is kept to a sane minimum and general style trends mean that most, if not all, of the source is formatted similarly and legibly. The system is so compact that you can keep most of the system source…

A fun tidbit from the Plan 9 compilers only really able to be found by reading the source: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.os.plan9/uMF7A4gk...

Re: Nobody's just reading your code

#50

Post by jmadsen »

I had to use a js library for something today.

npm install downloaded 113 new packages. I'm not even a javascript programmer; I'm saddled with being "full-stack"

I'm supposed to read all that every time I need a new library? Or write it myself, when I have absolutely no idea how to build something that complicated, if I had time, negating the whole point of OSS in the first place?

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