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Yes, simplicity... what a concept. Something the software engineering discipline seems to either loathe, be afraid of, or just want to avoid at any cost. For e
by Jupe 11y ago
Yes, simplicity... what a concept. Something the software engineering discipline seems to either loathe, be afraid of, or just want to avoid at any cost.
For example, why something as simple as 'git pull' has had so much confusion and discussion. Why there are millions of views on S.O. on just the differences between pull and fetch?
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/292357/what-are-the-differences-between-git-pull-and-git-fetch http://stackoverflow.com/questions/292357/what-are-the-diffe... ==> Viewed: 1080104 times
Good code doesn't just pass unit tests. It should be know-able, think-able, make some level of sense and generally be easily understandable.
- userbinator 11y agoSomething the software engineering discipline seems to either loathe, be afraid of, or just want to avoid at any cost. I think it has to do with the fact that a lot of developers are taught that abstraction/indirection are good things (and to a certain extent, they are), and can be used to manage complexity; but not that they're more of a last-resort option compared to actually making the design as simple as possible. Linus' rant about "helper functions" reminds me of a time when I taught an intro programming course and helped a student who, when faced with not knowing how to solve a problem, decided to take "write a helper function" as his mantra (apparently he read that somewhere in a book) and ended up with around a dozen-level-deep nested set of functions that turned out not to do anything useful at all - each one just called another and returned its result, except the deepest one, which he came to ask me about. He thought that the solution would somehow come to him more easily the more "abstract" (in his terms) the code became, and went steadfastly down that path - until common sense took over and he came to me wondering what he did and why it didn't work.
- alxmdev 11y agoWe are still in the first century of software development, I doubt any code written today will be relevant by the time we enter the second. The computer science class of 2065 will enjoy seeing all these chaotic things we made, running in virtual machines hosted by museums that are yet to be built :-)
- p1esk 11y agoI sure hope no one will have to write a computer code in 2065.
- chris_wot 11y agoThere were good reasons that the code was written the way it was. Perhaps you should follow the thread further.