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There's a famous quote by Linus Torvalds: "Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships." Even wh
by yen223 9y ago
There's a famous quote by Linus Torvalds: "Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships."
Even when prototyping, I find that nailing down the data structures from the get-go makes subsequent code-writing much easier. A lot of times, the code kind of falls out naturally when you've figured out the data structures you're working with.
Strongly-typed languages give you a nice way to define data structures.
- jejones3141 9y agoAnd Fred Brooks, from _The Mythical Man-Month_: "Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won’t usually need your flowcharts; they’ll be obvious."
- paganel 9y agoIt has been my experience that “data-structures” in real world situations and especially within code directly facing consumers varies a lot more compared to what any pre-implementation data design process can predict (I’d even say that the structure of a lousy data-input form on a god-forsaken website has the potential to change a lot more often compared to the intrinsic structure of the Linux kernel). Dynamic languages (like python or even php) are very good at tackling this real life situation, hence their popularity.
- Rapzid 9y agoThey are very good at letting you make the quick easy change while providing no helping hand in ensuring all your code is utilizing the data structure's new schema correctly They are "easy" in that sense which makes them popular with a subset if developers, while another subset loathes the terrible language services/tooling. Incidentally many dynamic languages seem to have attempted to bolt on some faux type system; python type annotations, phpdoc, jsdoc, type specs, etc, etc.