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Don't be clever

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Re: Don't be clever

#61

Post by horsawlarway »

wizofaus wrote: post #27
SanderNL wrote: post #13

I have swung both ways and I think I now settle somewhere near "boring is good" and "repetition is harmless (compared to the astronomic costs of wrong abstraction)". Especially repetition seems to be hated with the might of a thousand suns and while I get it, because I myself hated it, I now can see the beauty of it. What is currently a superficial repetition - a bunch of endpoint handlers, some forms - will often tu…

I hate repetition because it's nearly always laziness - it takes less thought/time to copy and paste a few lines of code than it does to factor them out into a reusable function and decide where to put it (and with what name). I'm taking about scenarios where the business logic needs to be exactly the same in both cases, there just happens to multiple ways to reach that point. On the other hand I also hate having to…

> I'm taking about scenarios where the business logic needs to be exactly the same in both cases, there just happens to multiple ways to reach that point.

I've seen lots of these cases turn out to be "the business logic happens to be exactly the same in both cases".

It might have been a single feature at one point where it should have been identical, but two flows going there in two different ways means it's serving two masters. Often it will diverge as the product grows and those flows become their own features with differing requirements.

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And also - "it takes less thought/time to copy and paste a few lines of code than it does to factor them out into a reusable function and decide where to put it (and with what name)."

Yes, that's the point. It takes both less time and thought, and it often diverges anyways. You are wasting time and creating complexity.

Re: Don't be clever

#63

Post by charles_f »

This sounds to me more like an argument for composition over inheritance(1) than a rebuke of being clever.

That your code is complex to change is a good sign that it's not design in an appropriate way.

Switching from "this code is repetitive" to "therefore I will automate the production of this code" sounds unfortunate though.

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composition_over_inheritance

Re: Don't be clever

#64

Post by cogman10 »

wallmountedtv wrote: post #34
jbandela1 wrote: post #15

> Yes, I had failed to see the proper solution: a class generator — so that I didn't have to manually copy code again No, please don't. This is jumping from the frying pan into the fire. If you think abstract base classes can be clever and hard to understand, code generators can be even more so. In addition, because code generators are a one way conversion, and the generated code evolves independently and the code ge…

As a blog post with the title "Don't be clever" ending up with the author's answer being an even clever-er solution, than talking about the hidden fight against complexity in software, was an odd ending note.

"Don't be clever, now let me tell you about the non-clever solution of writing a bespoke meta programming language to solve the problem of copy/paste"

Re: Don't be clever

#66

Post by sanderjd »

jbandela1 wrote: post #15

> Yes, I had failed to see the proper solution: a class generator — so that I didn't have to manually copy code again No, please don't. This is jumping from the frying pan into the fire. If you think abstract base classes can be clever and hard to understand, code generators can be even more so. In addition, because code generators are a one way conversion, and the generated code evolves independently and the code ge…

Generating code is fine, if the generated code strictly never evolves independently of what it is generated from. For instance generating libraries from .proto files (or other declarative schema definition solutions) works really well. If the schema changes, you throw away the old generated code and generate brand new code, no problem.

But if you want to make even a single tiny modification to one of the generated files, you're busted, you need a different solution.

Re: Don't be clever

#68

Post by toshk »

SanderNL wrote: post #13

I have swung both ways and I think I now settle somewhere near "boring is good" and "repetition is harmless (compared to the astronomic costs of wrong abstraction)". Especially repetition seems to be hated with the might of a thousand suns and while I get it, because I myself hated it, I now can see the beauty of it. What is currently a superficial repetition - a bunch of endpoint handlers, some forms - will often tu…

Repetition can definitely cause big issues.

Most of time you want business logic in the same place. In a big & old codebase it can be very hard to fix things if there are multiple places.

But certain things can be easily repeated.

Re: Don't be clever

#69

Post by sanderjd »

SanderNL wrote: post #13

I have swung both ways and I think I now settle somewhere near "boring is good" and "repetition is harmless (compared to the astronomic costs of wrong abstraction)". Especially repetition seems to be hated with the might of a thousand suns and while I get it, because I myself hated it, I now can see the beauty of it. What is currently a superficial repetition - a bunch of endpoint handlers, some forms - will often tu…

Always a continuum. Repetition is simple and good until it sucks :) Intuiting the right balance is an important part of the craft.

Re: Don't be clever

#70

Post by at_a_remove »

I have a slightly different view and I think expressing it in front of the right people may have gotten me a job. Programmers ought to be clever, but clever is something you hold in reserve. Choose the boring, the staid, the obvious. Clever is for when you're backed into a corner by odd requirements, edge cases that the obvious will not cover, and so on. Then, you comment your clever, journalism-style. Why were you clever? Where is the clever? Just how did you do it? When do you apply this? And so on.
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