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The best way to tell if someone has no idea what they’re talking about and are just mindlessly repeating other ideas is when they say the phrase “easier to reas

The best way to tell if someone has no idea what they’re talking about and are just mindlessly repeating other ideas is when they say the phrase “easier to reason about.” It appears in thousands of talks and blog posts. It’s completely subjective and unquantifiable what you or I think is easier to reason about. It’s largely (entirely?) about aesthetics.

jolux 7y ago
Pure functions are quite concretely easier to reason about though, because you know that when you are looking at a function or calling it that you don't have to be worrying about its effects on state and whether or not it is a leaky abstraction in that regard. I compare it a lot to looking at code in a dynamically scoped vs lexically scoped language. It is genuinely a massive step forward in clarity.
- verdagon 7y ago
  I have the opposite experience. My simple OO plane->setSpeed(400) function would become a functional monstrosity that takes in the entire previous world, and return a new World, Military, AirForce, and Fleet objects based on the old ones, to contain a new plane with the new speed. The entire function is way harder to reason about, because I can't tell from the outside what other parts of the world it may have accidentally modified. The lack of basic encapsulation really turns me off to FP. Supposedly the best FP answer to the problem was lenses, which would drive the complexity of my code up into the stratosphere. Shortly after trying those out, I migrated my project to imperative OO and haven't looked back since.
  - jolux 7y ago
    I thought getters and setters were considered an antipattern by most OO people anyways? Anyway beyond that the relevant part is not that one function call in isolation but wherever it’s getting called from and why it is getting called there. Without more context I don’t know how I would solve that but suffice it to say getting into lenses and the entire world and such sounds massively unnecessary.
Vinnl 7y ago
You can roughly quantify it as the number of things you need to keep in mind when looking at a piece of code. For example, if you need to be aware of how a variable is modified outside of the scope currently on your screen, that makes it harder to reason about. Possibly interesting: https://overreacted.io/the-bug-o-notation/ https://overreacted.io/the-bug-o-notation/
h91wka 7y ago
> The best way to tell if someone has no idea what they’re talking about and are just mindlessly repeating other ideas is when they say the phrase “easier to reason about.” "easier to reason about" is not someone's opinion, it's math. Please educate yourself on formal verification methods before drawing broad conclusions including substrings like "no idea" or "mindless repeating".

jolux 7y ago

Pure functions are quite concretely easier to reason about though, because you know that when you are looking at a function or calling it that you don't have to be worrying about its effects on state and whether or not it is a leaky abstraction in that regard. I compare it a lot to looking at code in a dynamically scoped vs lexically scoped language. It is genuinely a massive step forward in clarity.

verdagon 7y ago
I have the opposite experience. My simple OO plane->setSpeed(400) function would become a functional monstrosity that takes in the entire previous world, and return a new World, Military, AirForce, and Fleet objects based on the old ones, to contain a new plane with the new speed. The entire function is way harder to reason about, because I can't tell from the outside what other parts of the world it may have accidentally modified. The lack of basic encapsulation really turns me off to FP. Supposedly the best FP answer to the problem was lenses, which would drive the complexity of my code up into the stratosphere. Shortly after trying those out, I migrated my project to imperative OO and haven't looked back since.
- jolux 7y ago
  I thought getters and setters were considered an antipattern by most OO people anyways? Anyway beyond that the relevant part is not that one function call in isolation but wherever it’s getting called from and why it is getting called there. Without more context I don’t know how I would solve that but suffice it to say getting into lenses and the entire world and such sounds massively unnecessary.

Vinnl 7y ago

You can roughly quantify it as the number of things you need to keep in mind when looking at a piece of code. For example, if you need to be aware of how a variable is modified outside of the scope currently on your screen, that makes it harder to reason about. Possibly interesting: https://overreacted.io/the-bug-o-notation/ https://overreacted.io/the-bug-o-notation/

h91wka 7y ago

> The best way to tell if someone has no idea what they’re talking about and are just mindlessly repeating other ideas is when they say the phrase “easier to reason about.” "easier to reason about" is not someone's opinion, it's math. Please educate yourself on formal verification methods before drawing broad conclusions including substrings like "no idea" or "mindless repeating".