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> Does it work like that in any other industry? Yes, it does. Imagine you were a new underwriter at an insurance company and your predecessor used the shorthan

> Does it work like that in any other industry? Yes, it does. Imagine you were a new underwriter at an insurance company and your predecessor used the shorthand nomenclature for every detail on the accounts you're taking over, and failed to write out any of the detailed reasoning behind why they chose to approve or deny claims. How much longer would it take for you to be able to fill their shoes than if they had been just a little bit more descriptive in their documents? > "Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute." - Harold Abelson

jodrellblank 7y ago
Did you see that it was me quoting that exact quote as something to argue against? I don't know what shorthand nomenclature of insurance underwriting is, but if it's a standard part of insurance underwriting then I would expect a new hire to be familiar with it, or need time to become familiar with it. If it's something separate like actual Gregg or Pitman shorthand English which the one underwriter used personally, unrelated to underwriting skills, then I wouldn't compare that to a programming language's built-in ternary operators.
- 5trokerac3 7y ago
  > I would expect a new hire to be familiar with it, or need time to become familiar with it Which equals more overhead than is necessary. Elegance over accessibility is always more expensive, no matter the product. In my experience, folks who are obsessed with "perfect" code over readable code introduce the most long-lasting, destructive bugs, because, at best, nobody wants to and, at worst, nobody can decipher their stuff.
userbinator 7y ago
No, it doesn't. In most other industries, you are simply considered incompetent if you don't possess the skills or aren't willing to learn the ways of the trade. Look at aviation for example: pilots and ATC talk in jargon, acronyms, and abbreviations like it's a completely different dialect of English, anyone who complains that they can't understand would be laughed at and told to keep learning, and that's the way it should be. Yet the software industry seems to have developed an illness of perception, that encourages the continual lowest-common-denominator dumbing-down of code and an aversion to learning. From what I've seen "collaboration" as a justification for this, and from the types of people who are proponents of it, it appears to be related to the effort of managers to attempt to turn developers into disposable and easily replaceable drones; something which everyone actually writing code should be against. In the trades, there's no lack of teamwork either, but the prevailing notion is "the least skilled/experienced learns from the most" --- only in software does there seem to be a strong counter-trend to that. Perhaps we should not encourage the degradation of our craft. Maybe that quote should be modified slightly too: "Programs must be written for suitably qualified people to read"
- Cthulhu_ 7y ago
  > Look at aviation for example: pilots and ATC talk in jargon, acronyms, and abbreviations like it's a completely different dialect of English, anyone who complains that they can't understand would be laughed at and told to keep learning, and that's the way it should be. Yes, but the jargon and language used is standardized; pilots don't get to put their own twist on e.g. formal communication with the tower when they come in to landing. You don't get to switch to idk, km/h when communicating your airspeed.
  - userbinator 7y ago
    Yes, but the jargon and language used is standardized ...so is the ternary operator.

jodrellblank 7y ago

Did you see that it was me quoting that exact quote as something to argue against? I don't know what shorthand nomenclature of insurance underwriting is, but if it's a standard part of insurance underwriting then I would expect a new hire to be familiar with it, or need time to become familiar with it. If it's something separate like actual Gregg or Pitman shorthand English which the one underwriter used personally, unrelated to underwriting skills, then I wouldn't compare that to a programming language's built-in ternary operators.

5trokerac3 7y ago
> I would expect a new hire to be familiar with it, or need time to become familiar with it Which equals more overhead than is necessary. Elegance over accessibility is always more expensive, no matter the product. In my experience, folks who are obsessed with "perfect" code over readable code introduce the most long-lasting, destructive bugs, because, at best, nobody wants to and, at worst, nobody can decipher their stuff.

userbinator 7y ago

No, it doesn't. In most other industries, you are simply considered incompetent if you don't possess the skills or aren't willing to learn the ways of the trade. Look at aviation for example: pilots and ATC talk in jargon, acronyms, and abbreviations like it's a completely different dialect of English, anyone who complains that they can't understand would be laughed at and told to keep learning, and that's the way it should be. Yet the software industry seems to have developed an illness of perception, that encourages the continual lowest-common-denominator dumbing-down of code and an aversion to learning. From what I've seen "collaboration" as a justification for this, and from the types of people who are proponents of it, it appears to be related to the effort of managers to attempt to turn developers into disposable and easily replaceable drones; something which everyone actually writing code should be against. In the trades, there's no lack of teamwork either, but the prevailing notion is "the least skilled/experienced learns from the most" --- only in software does there seem to be a strong counter-trend to that. Perhaps we should not encourage the degradation of our craft. Maybe that quote should be modified slightly too: "Programs must be written for suitably qualified people to read"

Cthulhu_ 7y ago
> Look at aviation for example: pilots and ATC talk in jargon, acronyms, and abbreviations like it's a completely different dialect of English, anyone who complains that they can't understand would be laughed at and told to keep learning, and that's the way it should be. Yes, but the jargon and language used is standardized; pilots don't get to put their own twist on e.g. formal communication with the tower when they come in to landing. You don't get to switch to idk, km/h when communicating your airspeed.
- userbinator 7y ago
  Yes, but the jargon and language used is standardized ...so is the ternary operator.