5 ms·

Myths programmers believe

14 points by ohjeez 8y ago

mlthoughts2018 8y ago
I've worked on some really large cross-cutting codebases, probably the largest of which are these two: - an integrated aircraft and radar simulator that was originally written in the 80s and has code from multiple languages, added and morphed over time by many generations of different staff, and still in heavy use at least as late as when I worked on it in the 00s. - a suite of different search engine services for a large (Alexa top 400) ecommerce product search engine and online store. My experience after working on these huge, legacy, complex codebases is that if you need a "go to definition" feature in your editor or IDE, it's a symptom of a notably bad codebase (not just regular bad with all the usual suboptimalities that come up in corporate software, but notably worse than that). It's particularly bad when you have to use it to chase down an eventual base implementation in a hopelessly convoluted stack of inheritance. The pieces of software I've seen have the longest shelf life have been written with exacting and unforgiving focus on simplicity and separating units of code, in such a way that the details of an implementation are never far. It's sort of like the code's design is a conceptual KD-tree, so conditioned on being in a sub-section of the code, you know for sure anything you depend on is nearby and not far away, and certainly not hidden in a stack of inheritance. This is not an argument against "go to definition" capabilities in editing tools. I just take a little issue when the author says, > "Text editors can’t and don’t have features like autocomplete, go to definition, …" > "This usually shows up in the same discussions where Emacs is a terminal program. It also usually comes up when someone says an IDE is needed because of the features above. I don’t program without them, I think it’d be crazy to." I use Emacs and I never want autocomplete or "go to definition" features. I hate them. In the cases when I unfortunately need them it's a symptom of exceptionally bad software, not an endorsement that these features are themselves good things generally, except in so far as they offer help in exceptionally bad codebases. Insecticide is not a good thing generally. It's a good thing in bad cases when there's an insect problem, but if you find yourself in that situation really often, and you need insecticide so often that it becomes as familiar to you as your morning coffee, then it's a sign of a much bigger problem.
- girzel 8y ago
  > I use Emacs and I never want autocomplete or "go to definition" features. I hate them. In the cases when I unfortunately need them it's a symptom of exceptionally bad software I can understand wanting to be able to code without these features, but I can't understand "hating" them. I use "go to definition" not because I can't find a function definition, but because it gets me there faster. What's the moral advantage of opening a file and searching, vs hitting "M-."?
  - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
    If you're just talking about the first time you need to open the file, then sure, who cares. But I'm talking about the typical way of working when I have multiple files open and move between them or place them into multiple Emacs windows. In that case, it is SO much faster to jump based on knowing which file I intend to move to, rather than moving to a file because it happened to be the file that contained a given definition. If I have to think, "go to wherever function X is defined" that's a drastic mental slowdown compared with "C-x b <file where I already totally know where function X is because of the code structure>". It's similar with autocomplete, even for very long names. I am fast at typing, so the little disruption of needing to enter a visual scan mode to select the right entry from e.g. some JEDI autocomplete option is a huge time cost for me added up over all the times I would write out e.g. function or class names in my code. They are both the sort of thing that superficially sounds like it would save you time or cognitive load, but they don't, unless you happen to be in the pathological codebase scenario I was describing and you need the tools because the project's code organization does not permit being able to reason efficiently about it from local mental caches.
    - DatBear 8y ago
      I'm not sure what code completion you're using, but if it's contextual, I'm very lost as to how typing a ridiculously long name would be faster than auto completing it. Especially since once you're used to the auto complete, you can basically use shortcuts for specific things you're using in that context a lot. "BindingOperations.EnableCollectionSynchronization()?" oh, that's "bop.ecs". There should be very few options to pick from unless everything is very similarly named...
aequitas 8y ago
> I mean that the inherent complexity of the task at hand doesn’t go away and might even be harder to solve with a simple language. I see this so often everywhere. "Yes, but with this simple framework/database/language you don't have that complex problem anymore!". No, it just ignores the problem completely so eventually it will bite you and you now have to solve the complex underlying problem in the wrong domain. Problems never go away, you just move them to a different place. The trick is which place to move them to.
RickJWagner 8y ago
Hacker News paydirt!

14 points by ohjeez 8y ago

mlthoughts2018 8y ago

I've worked on some really large cross-cutting codebases, probably the largest of which are these two: - an integrated aircraft and radar simulator that was originally written in the 80s and has code from multiple languages, added and morphed over time by many generations of different staff, and still in heavy use at least as late as when I worked on it in the 00s. - a suite of different search engine services for a large (Alexa top 400) ecommerce product search engine and online store. My experience after working on these huge, legacy, complex codebases is that if you need a "go to definition" feature in your editor or IDE, it's a symptom of a notably bad codebase (not just regular bad with all the usual suboptimalities that come up in corporate software, but notably worse than that). It's particularly bad when you have to use it to chase down an eventual base implementation in a hopelessly convoluted stack of inheritance. The pieces of software I've seen have the longest shelf life have been written with exacting and unforgiving focus on simplicity and separating units of code, in such a way that the details of an implementation are never far. It's sort of like the code's design is a conceptual KD-tree, so conditioned on being in a sub-section of the code, you know for sure anything you depend on is nearby and not far away, and certainly not hidden in a stack of inheritance. This is not an argument against "go to definition" capabilities in editing tools. I just take a little issue when the author says, > "Text editors can’t and don’t have features like autocomplete, go to definition, …" > "This usually shows up in the same discussions where Emacs is a terminal program. It also usually comes up when someone says an IDE is needed because of the features above. I don’t program without them, I think it’d be crazy to." I use Emacs and I never want autocomplete or "go to definition" features. I hate them. In the cases when I unfortunately need them it's a symptom of exceptionally bad software, not an endorsement that these features are themselves good things generally, except in so far as they offer help in exceptionally bad codebases. Insecticide is not a good thing generally. It's a good thing in bad cases when there's an insect problem, but if you find yourself in that situation really often, and you need insecticide so often that it becomes as familiar to you as your morning coffee, then it's a sign of a much bigger problem.

girzel 8y ago
> I use Emacs and I never want autocomplete or "go to definition" features. I hate them. In the cases when I unfortunately need them it's a symptom of exceptionally bad software I can understand wanting to be able to code without these features, but I can't understand "hating" them. I use "go to definition" not because I can't find a function definition, but because it gets me there faster. What's the moral advantage of opening a file and searching, vs hitting "M-."?
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  If you're just talking about the first time you need to open the file, then sure, who cares. But I'm talking about the typical way of working when I have multiple files open and move between them or place them into multiple Emacs windows. In that case, it is SO much faster to jump based on knowing which file I intend to move to, rather than moving to a file because it happened to be the file that contained a given definition. If I have to think, "go to wherever function X is defined" that's a drastic mental slowdown compared with "C-x b <file where I already totally know where function X is because of the code structure>". It's similar with autocomplete, even for very long names. I am fast at typing, so the little disruption of needing to enter a visual scan mode to select the right entry from e.g. some JEDI autocomplete option is a huge time cost for me added up over all the times I would write out e.g. function or class names in my code. They are both the sort of thing that superficially sounds like it would save you time or cognitive load, but they don't, unless you happen to be in the pathological codebase scenario I was describing and you need the tools because the project's code organization does not permit being able to reason efficiently about it from local mental caches.
  - DatBear 8y ago
    I'm not sure what code completion you're using, but if it's contextual, I'm very lost as to how typing a ridiculously long name would be faster than auto completing it. Especially since once you're used to the auto complete, you can basically use shortcuts for specific things you're using in that context a lot. "BindingOperations.EnableCollectionSynchronization()?" oh, that's "bop.ecs". There should be very few options to pick from unless everything is very similarly named...

aequitas 8y ago

> I mean that the inherent complexity of the task at hand doesn’t go away and might even be harder to solve with a simple language. I see this so often everywhere. "Yes, but with this simple framework/database/language you don't have that complex problem anymore!". No, it just ignores the problem completely so eventually it will bite you and you now have to solve the complex underlying problem in the wrong domain. Problems never go away, you just move them to a different place. The trick is which place to move them to.

RickJWagner 8y ago

Hacker News paydirt!