The Complexity Trap: Think Before You Leap • Hacker News Board

Re: The Complexity Trap: Think Before You Leap

#41

Post by reificator » Wed, Dec 12, 2018, 12:00 AM UTC

Franciscouzo wrote: post #40

reificator wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not though. They only exist as the relation between the edge and the start of content. How many levels of indentation are there on each line? https://i.imgur.com/s1WBHxU.png Spoiler: Line 3 has no indentation while Line 6 has one level. Line 4 has a mix of tabs and spaces that would confuse Python. The fact of the matter is that indentation is white space, and white space is implicit by definition. It only ex…

Stop using a legacy version of Python. You will get a "TabError: inconsistent use of tabs and spaces in indentation" exception if you use Python 3.

I haven't used python with inconsistent indentation recently, that's true.

Re: The Complexity Trap: Think Before You Leap

#42

Post by hnuser355 » Wed, Dec 12, 2018, 1:28 AM UTC

titzer wrote: post #9

“Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?” --Brian Kernighan How many times have I bitten myself this way? Dear past me: stop being so smart.

This is an astounding quotation

Re: The Complexity Trap: Think Before You Leap

#43

Post by Ericson2314 » Wed, Dec 12, 2018, 1:50 AM UTC

Scala is an especially messed up situation. Everything is either overengineered or simplistic; there is no good middle ground because the language is a mess.

This is a little-acknowledged industry-wide problem that extends beyond hot-shot overengineering to reems of banal code too, so I would rather it be written from a less expected perspective.

Re: The Complexity Trap: Think Before You Leap

#44

Post by reificator » Wed, Dec 12, 2018, 4:25 AM UTC

xamuel wrote: post #35

reificator wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> functional fanatics that design solutions only top 20% of devs can understand Not a part of that group, but I think this is a false narrative. 20% might be accurate, or it might be a bit high even. But it has nothing to do with `top` or `bottom` performers. It's purely to do with exposure to functional styles. Learning Haskell first doesn't make you a top 20% developer, much as I'm sure HN in particular will want t…

>many who learn one first Everyone learns imperative first. "Wake up!" or "Eat your vegetables!" are imperative. No-one says to their kids, "map(vegetables, eat)"

I mean, those are much closer to functional than imperative tbh. At best it's simply too abstracted to discuss either way. Recipes would be a better example.

If you want to use that example it'd be more like this snippet that no one on earth would tell their children:

> Starting from n = 0, take the nth vegetable from your plate, insert your fork into that vegetable, raise your fork to your mouth, bite that vegetable, remove your fork from your mouth, masticate, add one to n, and repeat.

Re: The Complexity Trap: Think Before You Leap

#45

Post by goldrake » Wed, Dec 12, 2018, 12:47 PM UTC

kreetx wrote: post #3

Has somewhat similar intro to the Rich Hickey's famous "Simple made easy" talk. A good read nevertheless.

...and that's IMO a good thing.

Re: The Complexity Trap: Think Before You Leap

#46

Post by goldrake » Wed, Dec 12, 2018, 12:55 PM UTC

afpx wrote: post #6

As one who frequently deals with Scala code, I have to say that this guy is right: the Scala community in particular seems to relish in complexity. Scala is a wonderful language and well-designed, especially in contrast to Java. The learning curve requires a good deal of effort, but with experience, it becomes incredibly fun to write Scala code. Once I got past the learning curve, Scala became my go-to language. That…

I agree with you 100% plus, I'd like to take it up a notch by saying that Pure FP evangelists are the sole reason why Scala is not widely used.

Also, it is not seldom that you hear them say "It took me n years to fully grok the _whatever FP concept_". Or Martin Odersky doesn't get the _whatever FP concept_.

So how do they expect the majority of sw engineers will use/adopt those principles if the guy who invented Scala "does not get it" and even themselves took so much time to "get it"...???

Re: The Complexity Trap: Think Before You Leap

#47

Post by kreetx » Wed, Dec 12, 2018, 8:43 PM UTC

goldrake wrote: post #45

kreetx wrote: post #3

Has somewhat similar intro to the Rich Hickey's famous "Simple made easy" talk. A good read nevertheless.

...and that's IMO a good thing.

Well, it feels borderline weird -- since it's so obviously similar, it could use a reference.