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> clarity is more important than performance, But he does not say that! You are deliberately misrepresenting the meaning of the quote. He says he focus on clar

by goto11 7y ago

> clarity is more important than performance, But he does not say that! You are deliberately misrepresenting the meaning of the quote. He says he focus on clarity first and only optimize for performance if absolutely necessary. You can disagree with that, but it is a totally different thing. If you have legitimate disagreements which his viewpoints you should be able to state your argument without needing to misrepresent what he says. Then we can have a conversation and maybe learn something.

camgunz 7y ago
I mean I quoted the entire 3 paragraphs up there, so of course I'm paraphrasing. Fowler advocates strongly for OOP. Presumably he'd find an OO entity system clearer (if you're gonna quibble with this, imagine how much more productive this conversation would be if we had an understanding of what "clearer" meant, then recoil in horror as you realize thousands of developers are having this exact same unproductive discussion, all because one guy said he had the answers but didn't really give specifics, like Fermat's final theorem but for devs), but the fact remains that if you built a modern entity system this way you'd have to rewrite it to get even average performance out of it. No amount of refactoring will fix the base design. So I feel like I have disagreed directly with his point, and I'm happy to discuss further. I do, weirdly, feel a little like you're not applying the principle of charity to me though. So let's both endeavor to be a little more understanding.
- goto11 7y ago
  > I do, weirdly, feel a little like you're not applying the principle of charity to me though. Fair enough, we can all be guilty of that. What part of your argument have I misunderstood or misrepresented?
  - camgunz 7y ago
    I think I've pretty directly disagreed with: > focus on clarity first and only optimize for performance if absolutely necessary I think that in a lot of very important, very common use cases (take your pick: game engines, embedded programming, OS development, language runtimes, linear algebra libraries, etc. etc. etc.) this is extremely bad advice. It's... probably good advice for enterprise applications; but that's a pretty small subset of all software. I think that if you start with clarity here and do performance optimization after the fact you will build something that can't be used as intended--almost always (of course, not "alwaysly", see Python). More broadly, I think this is a far too narrow way of looking at "clarity" vs. "performance". I have some idea of what I think clarity is, and I have some idea of what I think performance is, and they're both pretty nuanced and deep topics. I think they're two big bags of variables in an even larger bag of engineering variables, and I think Fowler does us all a huge disservice when he skips that entire discussion with what is your synopsis up top there. Maybe you're writing Python and you need a certain level of dynamic nature in order to reach your desired level of flexibility and clarity. That can be fine! The point here is that these are rich topics, and they deserve better than what I see as a pretty blithe dismissal.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]

by goto11 7y ago

camgunz 7y ago

I mean I quoted the entire 3 paragraphs up there, so of course I'm paraphrasing. Fowler advocates strongly for OOP. Presumably he'd find an OO entity system clearer (if you're gonna quibble with this, imagine how much more productive this conversation would be if we had an understanding of what "clearer" meant, then recoil in horror as you realize thousands of developers are having this exact same unproductive discussion, all because one guy said he had the answers but didn't really give specifics, like Fermat's final theorem but for devs), but the fact remains that if you built a modern entity system this way you'd have to rewrite it to get even average performance out of it. No amount of refactoring will fix the base design. So I feel like I have disagreed directly with his point, and I'm happy to discuss further. I do, weirdly, feel a little like you're not applying the principle of charity to me though. So let's both endeavor to be a little more understanding.

goto11 7y ago
> I do, weirdly, feel a little like you're not applying the principle of charity to me though. Fair enough, we can all be guilty of that. What part of your argument have I misunderstood or misrepresented?
- camgunz 7y ago
  I think I've pretty directly disagreed with: > focus on clarity first and only optimize for performance if absolutely necessary I think that in a lot of very important, very common use cases (take your pick: game engines, embedded programming, OS development, language runtimes, linear algebra libraries, etc. etc. etc.) this is extremely bad advice. It's... probably good advice for enterprise applications; but that's a pretty small subset of all software. I think that if you start with clarity here and do performance optimization after the fact you will build something that can't be used as intended--almost always (of course, not "alwaysly", see Python). More broadly, I think this is a far too narrow way of looking at "clarity" vs. "performance". I have some idea of what I think clarity is, and I have some idea of what I think performance is, and they're both pretty nuanced and deep topics. I think they're two big bags of variables in an even larger bag of engineering variables, and I think Fowler does us all a huge disservice when he skips that entire discussion with what is your synopsis up top there. Maybe you're writing Python and you need a certain level of dynamic nature in order to reach your desired level of flexibility and clarity. That can be fine! The point here is that these are rich topics, and they deserve better than what I see as a pretty blithe dismissal.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]