3 ms·

Good design and type safety in Yahtzee

• skybrian 7y ago
  Although I don't think it applies in this example, it might be worth pointing out a trade-off: the more constraints you encode into parameter or return types in a API, the more specialized it is and the more likely that a change will be backward incompatible.
  • firethief 7y ago
    Let's consider two types of constraints: incidental constraints, and necessary constraints that would also exist when latently-typed. Having much of the former is a design smell. The latter force you to address problems at compile time that might otherwise be hidden crashes, security flaws, logic bugs... I think the trade-off is that designing with types is hard, and without a lot of experience in a statically-typed language types can create more problems than they solve, as in the original code this blog post corrects.
• z3t4 7y ago
  In a program that has like 20 bits of data, eg. the complexity of a hello world. you shouldn't be worrying about things like performance, safety, etc. Just allow yourself to write stupid ugly code and be done with it.
  • dcsommer 7y ago
    Learning to "do it right" in a simpler setting is how we learn to apply the lesson in the real world. It's a lot more mental effort, at first, to write a program this way. But over time, the exercise pays off and you find it natural to write more readable, correct, performant, etc. code as a result. Appropriate laziness is good engineering, but subject mastery comes from avoiding laziness and intentionally practicing. The trick is to figure out how much of this intentional practice you can get away with on the job ;)