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Thank You, Guido

blog.dropbox.com

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Re: Thank You, Guido

#61

Post by quaquaqua1 »

skellera wrote: post #45
notkaiho wrote: post #2

"“When asked, I would give people my opinion that maintainable code is more important than clever code,” he said. “If I encountered clever code that was particularly cryptic, and I had to do some maintenance on it, I would probably rewrite it. So I led by example, and also by talking to other people.”" This is very sage advice.

You’d think it would be common sense when writing something that other people will read. We don’t see people writing books in acronyms or omitting words. How come so many people try to use code to show how smart they are?

It's terrible. People use deliberate crypticness to flex on everyone who hasn't seen x subniche of programming style before. They designed it to be like this to be the gatekeeper at their organization.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#62

Post by greenshackle2 »

FpUser wrote: post #46
FpUser wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"But it never amounts to anything close to a debate about what language I should use." So if your task was to deliver let's say commercial grade FFT library ( substitute with any other long computationally extensive process ) for consumption by others you would write it in Python?

Simple question leads to downvoting? Looks like we have a knight in shining armor protecting the castle of Python.

Questions made in bad faith tend to be downvoted. Is this really a suprise?

Re: Thank You, Guido

#63

Post by specialist »

peterwwillis wrote: post #41
not2b wrote: post #16

Did you notice this: "He has already put into motion the conversion of the Dropbox server code from Python 2 to Python 3." Even the company that hired Guido is still heavily dependent on Python 2, and it doesn't surprise me at all; my own employer still has a lot of it in internal tools.

There has to be a term for when the business builds something with one tech stack, and then later, as if it was totally by surprise, realizes it needs to replace the whole thing, for basically no added business-value, and this happens every few years. I mean, everyone has known they would have to do this eventually, but it just kept being put off, like the business is a bad procrastinator. And they all do this.

Same as every other industry.

Being a CADD person, I had a lot of contact with A/E/C, facilities management, space planning, etc.

Seems like everyone suffers legacy, neglects maintenance, prefers do overs.

Cultural? Misaligned incentives? Bad accounting? Complexity catastrophe (when cost of any change outweighs benefits)?

If someone knows, please tell.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#64

Post by earenndil »

ajford wrote: post #28
exabrial wrote: post #12

> It is so intuitive and beautifully designed No it's not. Significant whitespace, underscores that mean things, lack of type system (but people treat variables as typed anyway), et all, make it quite a difficult language to understand. And we won't get into performance problems that it's cult following turns a blind eye to. I will say Python has inspired a generation of languages that got away from the C-inspired sy…

For a beginner, compared to many languages out there, it is very intuitive. I taught many 1st/2nd year college students Python as their first foray into programming, and it's flexibility and readability was a great way to get people in the door. I won't defend beauty, as that's extremely subjective. I happen to find the whitespace significantly more intelligible than nested braces and parens, but that's me. I know pl…

> Lisp is a bad language to write an OS in

Beg to differ. Lisp machines were huge, back in the day, and there are still hobbyist projects like https://github.com/froggey/Mezzano

Re: Thank You, Guido

#66

Post by pdonis »

skellera wrote: post #45
notkaiho wrote: post #2

"“When asked, I would give people my opinion that maintainable code is more important than clever code,” he said. “If I encountered clever code that was particularly cryptic, and I had to do some maintenance on it, I would probably rewrite it. So I led by example, and also by talking to other people.”" This is very sage advice.

You’d think it would be common sense when writing something that other people will read. We don’t see people writing books in acronyms or omitting words. How come so many people try to use code to show how smart they are?

> How come so many people try to use code to show how smart they are?

Writing clever code doesn't mean it's being done for that reason. As the article notes, Guido himself agreed that in the early stages of developing a piece of software, such as in an early stage startup, it probably makes sense to write clever code, because you can get it done faster and therefore iterate faster on improving the code to meet user needs. At this stage very few people are working on the code (often just one), so communicating with other developers is not a big issue.

The need for making it maintainable comes later, when the product is mature and many more people are working on the code, so the need for clear communication becomes much stronger.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#67

Post by riffraff »

whitten wrote: post #56
peterwwillis wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There has to be a term for when the business builds something with one tech stack, and then later, as if it was totally by surprise, realizes it needs to replace the whole thing, for basically no added business-value, and this happens every few years. I mean, everyone has known they would have to do this eventually, but it just kept being put off, like the business is a bad procrastinator. And they all do this.

I assume you are referring to "technical debt", unless you were being ironic and I didn't catch your irony emoji. (Is there an ironic emoji?)

there almost is, an irony mark or percontation point "⸮" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_punctuation

Re: Thank You, Guido

#68

Post by raister »

w-m wrote: post #38

There's a whole generation of programming language creators born in the early to mid 1950s. In no particular order: Guido van Rossum (Python), Bjarne Stroustrup (C++), James Gosling (Java), Rob Pike (Go), Larry Wall (Perl), Walter Bright (D). Makes me wonder what kind of secret club they have going on.. Enjoy the retirement, Guido!

I can only dream of a panel or a TED talk with those computing sages! (I guess they are all alive right)

Re: Thank You, Guido

#69

Post by jtms »

FpUser wrote: post #46
FpUser wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"But it never amounts to anything close to a debate about what language I should use." So if your task was to deliver let's say commercial grade FFT library ( substitute with any other long computationally extensive process ) for consumption by others you would write it in Python?

Simple question leads to downvoting? Looks like we have a knight in shining armor protecting the castle of Python.

The condescending and arrogant tone got you downvoted both here and in your previous comment

Re: Thank You, Guido

#70

Post by FpUser »

ivalm wrote: post #55
FpUser wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"But it never amounts to anything close to a debate about what language I should use." So if your task was to deliver let's say commercial grade FFT library ( substitute with any other long computationally extensive process ) for consumption by others you would write it in Python?

Clearly his statement is predicated on the kind of work he does. Dont be obtuse.

If this is "predicated by the type of work" then why make generic statement? Am I the one being obtuse?
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