6 ms·

The Ultimate Code Kata

59 points by bdfh42 18y ago

wenbert 18y ago
I have been doing pet projects (some of my dumbest ideas) and some freelance work to "practice". This has been going for at least 3 years now ^_^ so far so good...
edw519 18y ago
Very interesting post. Reminded me of an argument between 2 great billiards players, Willie Mosconi and Minnesota Fats. Willie was the best player in the world at the time, winner of many championships. Fats was a hustler who never won anything except money. Each vowed to kick the other's butt in a match. Of course, Willie kicked Fats's butt, to which Fats responded, "So what. If there was money on the table I would have won." This article made me realize I am more like Fats than Willie. I have interviewed and worked with many great programmers, but hardly consider myself in their class. They may know 27 ways to sort data, but being like Fats, I only need to know one to get the job done (and take the money). If there was a competition, they would kick my butt. But if a client had to get something done, I could hold my own against any of them. The advice in each person's list was excellent. To become a better practitioner of the art and science of "programming". Which is not quite the same thing as "getting the job done". A typical scenario I have seen over and over: Competitor A is doing B, so we have to do C. This means that we'll have to modify our app to get data x from source y and present it to certain people so they have what we need to compete. We're losing $10,000 per day by not doing this, so we need it ASAP. My solution is rarely optimal, sometimes clever, sometimes not, and often a hack. But it gets done quickly, it works, and it "does the job". That makes me more like Fats. But since I still aspire to be more like Willie, I'll start doing a few more things on these lists.
- gcv 18y ago
  My solution is rarely optimal, sometimes clever, sometimes not, and often a hack. But it gets done quickly, it works, and it "does the job". Quite frankly, I hate "solutions" like that. I have spent way too much time supporting code written by people who "get the job done," but do so inefficiently, and cause the system to keel over two months later. Or do so poorly, and so the system mysteriously breaks when the "hacks" don't quite work. Penny-wise, dollar-foolish. Sure, you save some time up-front coming up with the hack, and "get the business up and running." In my experience, it never takes long for "the business" to come back and say "I thought you fixed this."
  - edw519 18y ago
    Exactly. That's why I aspire to be better. In all fairness, though, this often has more to do with management than anything technical. No matter how much I teach my customers, sometimes they just don't learn.
  - Tamerlin 18y ago
    Same here. Solutions like that are unfortunately the norm, which is leading to the deplorable state of software industry wide, and the general and growing malaise from the developers. When I started out as a developer, I was one of the best. Over the years, I've gotten rusty because my work has been so mind-numbing that the last thing I've been wanting to do after work has been to look at more code.
  - mechanical_fish 18y ago
    In my experience, it never takes long for "the business" to come back and say "I thought you fixed this." Yes. But the problem is that without the sub-optimal time-saving hack the business might not have come back at all. A business that can afford to pay people to fix the hacks that kept it solvent last month is called successful. [1] So, there's a balance. Inevitably, it's impossible to get the balance quite right, so even the optimal software engineering job involves spending half your time complaining about overengineered code and the other half complaining about underengineered code. [1] Of course, many businesses just pay people to paper over last month's hacks with a new month's worth of hacks, ad infinitum. That is sort of like success... for as long as the house of cards stays up. But it is also hell.
  - abstractbill 18y ago
    Yes, but on the other hand there's no point perfecting something until you know it's actually going to stick around. There have been times at JTV where I've implemented some feature and put it into production, only to find it doesn't stick - nobody really wanted it. In cases like these a quick hack is definitely the right thing to do - there's no point worrying about a system keeling over in two months if that system won't even exist in two months.
  - gaius 18y ago
    The real world is often messy, and solutions that work in it are often messy. The best you can hope for is that someone uses a lookup table/config file instead of a tangled nest of hard-coded "if" statements. But seeking elegant algorithms to address real world problems is often a wild goose chase.
- fallentimes 18y ago
  Sort of related...an excerpt from Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Black Swan): "For the non-mathematician, probability is an indecipherably complex field. But Taleb makes it easy by proving all the mathematics wrong. Let me introduce you to Brooklyn-born Fat Tony and academically inclined Dr John, two of Taleb's creations. You toss a coin 40 times and it comes up heads every time. What is the chance of it coming up heads the 41st time? Dr John gives the answer drummed into the heads of every statistic student: 50/50. Fat Tony shakes his head and says the chances are no more than 1%. "You are either full of crap," he says, "or a pure sucker to buy that 50% business. The coin gotta be loaded." The chances of a coin coming up heads 41 times are so small as to be effectively impossible in this universe. It is far, far more likely that somebody is cheating. Fat Tony wins. Dr John is the sucker. And the one thing that drives Taleb more than anything else is the determination not to be a sucker. Dr John is the economist or banker who thinks he can manage risk through mathematics. Fat Tony relies only on what happens in the real world. "
pavelludiq 18y ago
The point about learning more languages that are different from one another seemed interesting. I know that knowing more languages makes you better, so i wish to learn more. I know python and started to learn scheme, can any one suggest me a 3-rd language?
- KirinDave 18y ago
  Ruby. Especially if you know Python, take the time to really learn Ruby.
  - hugh 18y ago
    Ruby really isn't sufficiently different from Python to make it a worthwhile third language, is it? Maybe a sixth or seventh language, after C, C++, Erlang, f77 and Assembly.
    - pavelludiq 18y ago
      yeah, i started to read a ruby tutorial and in 20 minutes i stopped, i might learn it if i have to. I do own a K&R ANSI C, and i thought of reading it, but didn't find low level programing as fun as python. I will learn it eventually, but i won't learn assembly, C is as low level as i will go. I've been thinking of learning smalltalk any opinions?
      - hugh 18y ago
        I do own a K&R ANSI C, and i thought of reading it, but didn't find low level programing as fun as python. I will learn it eventually This is why I reckon it's better to learn C before you learn any of the higher-level scripting-type languages. Same reason you should learn to drive a manual before you learn to drive an automatic. (Of course in both cases I'm just advising people to do the same thing that I did, which is always the weakest form of advice.)
      - qwph 18y ago
        Learning Smalltalk is a great idea, but be warned - its workflow is very different to most other languages (for example, it doesn't really have a command line in the same sense that Ruby or Python does). If you can get over the first couple of weeks of frustration, you'll probably learn a lot.
projectileboy 18y ago
FWIW, my "code kata" is to try exercises from SICP in whatever language I happen to be playing with, which is really just an excuse to re-read portions of SICP. Always a pleasure...
- Tamerlin 18y ago
  That's one of mine also; I'm using How to Design Programs as a way to learn Scheme, and also doing some small Rails project work on the side to de-rust my Rails skills... And getting started on a web site for myself. But that one will be considerably more visually oriented than most of the stuff I work on, so it's going to be a bit longer in coming. :)
hugh 18y ago
...replying to mail isn't practicing your typing. You have to set aside some time once in a while and do focused practice in order to get better at something. An odd example, since I'm pretty sure we've all got a lot better at typing without really trying. I just did a test to find out, and it turns out that in the last fifteen years that I've spent not learning to type, I've gone from about 35 wpm to 81. Fifteen years ago, 81 wpm would have been a pretty impressive typing speed, but nowadays I guess it's pretty normal, since the whole world has got better at typing. It doesn't seem so long ago that people were still putting their typing speed on their resumes, but nowadays high-speed typing is taken for granted -- it's gone from being a skill to being a reflex, for most people. I'm not sure about programming, though. I'm sure it's possible to get better without really trying, but really trying will get you there faster. I guess the real difference is that typing is an "easy" skill where you can reach the maximum reasonable level of competence quite easily (who really needs more than 60 wpm?), whereas programming is a "hard" skill where there's far more to learn than you can possibly fit into one lifetime.
- jauco 18y ago
  I guess the articles author is not talking about strokes per minute but rather how well you're able to put your thoughts into words. That's a skill that's more on the same level as programming.
  - hugh 18y ago
    In that example I would have thought "typing" just means, well, typing.
- sofal 18y ago
  My typing skills improved dramatically just by participating in flame wars on Battle.net over StarCraft skirmishes. Those were the days...
Tichy 18y ago
Does reading Hacker News count as training?
- eru 18y ago
  Too easy.

59 points by bdfh42 18y ago

I have been doing pet projects (some of my dumbest ideas) and some freelance work to "practice". This has been going for at least 3 years now ^_^ so far so good...

edw519 18y ago

Very interesting post. Reminded me of an argument between 2 great billiards players, Willie Mosconi and Minnesota Fats. Willie was the best player in the world at the time, winner of many championships. Fats was a hustler who never won anything except money. Each vowed to kick the other's butt in a match. Of course, Willie kicked Fats's butt, to which Fats responded, "So what. If there was money on the table I would have won." This article made me realize I am more like Fats than Willie. I have interviewed and worked with many great programmers, but hardly consider myself in their class. They may know 27 ways to sort data, but being like Fats, I only need to know one to get the job done (and take the money). If there was a competition, they would kick my butt. But if a client had to get something done, I could hold my own against any of them. The advice in each person's list was excellent. To become a better practitioner of the art and science of "programming". Which is not quite the same thing as "getting the job done". A typical scenario I have seen over and over: Competitor A is doing B, so we have to do C. This means that we'll have to modify our app to get data x from source y and present it to certain people so they have what we need to compete. We're losing $10,000 per day by not doing this, so we need it ASAP. My solution is rarely optimal, sometimes clever, sometimes not, and often a hack. But it gets done quickly, it works, and it "does the job". That makes me more like Fats. But since I still aspire to be more like Willie, I'll start doing a few more things on these lists.

gcv 18y ago
My solution is rarely optimal, sometimes clever, sometimes not, and often a hack. But it gets done quickly, it works, and it "does the job". Quite frankly, I hate "solutions" like that. I have spent way too much time supporting code written by people who "get the job done," but do so inefficiently, and cause the system to keel over two months later. Or do so poorly, and so the system mysteriously breaks when the "hacks" don't quite work. Penny-wise, dollar-foolish. Sure, you save some time up-front coming up with the hack, and "get the business up and running." In my experience, it never takes long for "the business" to come back and say "I thought you fixed this."
- edw519 18y ago
  Exactly. That's why I aspire to be better. In all fairness, though, this often has more to do with management than anything technical. No matter how much I teach my customers, sometimes they just don't learn.
- Tamerlin 18y ago
  Same here. Solutions like that are unfortunately the norm, which is leading to the deplorable state of software industry wide, and the general and growing malaise from the developers. When I started out as a developer, I was one of the best. Over the years, I've gotten rusty because my work has been so mind-numbing that the last thing I've been wanting to do after work has been to look at more code.
- mechanical_fish 18y ago
  In my experience, it never takes long for "the business" to come back and say "I thought you fixed this." Yes. But the problem is that without the sub-optimal time-saving hack the business might not have come back at all. A business that can afford to pay people to fix the hacks that kept it solvent last month is called successful. [1] So, there's a balance. Inevitably, it's impossible to get the balance quite right, so even the optimal software engineering job involves spending half your time complaining about overengineered code and the other half complaining about underengineered code. [1] Of course, many businesses just pay people to paper over last month's hacks with a new month's worth of hacks, ad infinitum. That is sort of like success... for as long as the house of cards stays up. But it is also hell.
- abstractbill 18y ago
  Yes, but on the other hand there's no point perfecting something until you know it's actually going to stick around. There have been times at JTV where I've implemented some feature and put it into production, only to find it doesn't stick - nobody really wanted it. In cases like these a quick hack is definitely the right thing to do - there's no point worrying about a system keeling over in two months if that system won't even exist in two months.
- gaius 18y ago
  The real world is often messy, and solutions that work in it are often messy. The best you can hope for is that someone uses a lookup table/config file instead of a tangled nest of hard-coded "if" statements. But seeking elegant algorithms to address real world problems is often a wild goose chase.
fallentimes 18y ago
Sort of related...an excerpt from Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Black Swan): "For the non-mathematician, probability is an indecipherably complex field. But Taleb makes it easy by proving all the mathematics wrong. Let me introduce you to Brooklyn-born Fat Tony and academically inclined Dr John, two of Taleb's creations. You toss a coin 40 times and it comes up heads every time. What is the chance of it coming up heads the 41st time? Dr John gives the answer drummed into the heads of every statistic student: 50/50. Fat Tony shakes his head and says the chances are no more than 1%. "You are either full of crap," he says, "or a pure sucker to buy that 50% business. The coin gotta be loaded." The chances of a coin coming up heads 41 times are so small as to be effectively impossible in this universe. It is far, far more likely that somebody is cheating. Fat Tony wins. Dr John is the sucker. And the one thing that drives Taleb more than anything else is the determination not to be a sucker. Dr John is the economist or banker who thinks he can manage risk through mathematics. Fat Tony relies only on what happens in the real world. "

pavelludiq 18y ago

The point about learning more languages that are different from one another seemed interesting. I know that knowing more languages makes you better, so i wish to learn more. I know python and started to learn scheme, can any one suggest me a 3-rd language?

KirinDave 18y ago
Ruby. Especially if you know Python, take the time to really learn Ruby.
- hugh 18y ago
  Ruby really isn't sufficiently different from Python to make it a worthwhile third language, is it? Maybe a sixth or seventh language, after C, C++, Erlang, f77 and Assembly.
  - pavelludiq 18y ago
    yeah, i started to read a ruby tutorial and in 20 minutes i stopped, i might learn it if i have to. I do own a K&R ANSI C, and i thought of reading it, but didn't find low level programing as fun as python. I will learn it eventually, but i won't learn assembly, C is as low level as i will go. I've been thinking of learning smalltalk any opinions?
    - hugh 18y ago
      I do own a K&R ANSI C, and i thought of reading it, but didn't find low level programing as fun as python. I will learn it eventually This is why I reckon it's better to learn C before you learn any of the higher-level scripting-type languages. Same reason you should learn to drive a manual before you learn to drive an automatic. (Of course in both cases I'm just advising people to do the same thing that I did, which is always the weakest form of advice.)
    - qwph 18y ago
      Learning Smalltalk is a great idea, but be warned - its workflow is very different to most other languages (for example, it doesn't really have a command line in the same sense that Ruby or Python does). If you can get over the first couple of weeks of frustration, you'll probably learn a lot.

projectileboy 18y ago

FWIW, my "code kata" is to try exercises from SICP in whatever language I happen to be playing with, which is really just an excuse to re-read portions of SICP. Always a pleasure...

Tamerlin 18y ago
That's one of mine also; I'm using How to Design Programs as a way to learn Scheme, and also doing some small Rails project work on the side to de-rust my Rails skills... And getting started on a web site for myself. But that one will be considerably more visually oriented than most of the stuff I work on, so it's going to be a bit longer in coming. :)

hugh 18y ago

...replying to mail isn't practicing your typing. You have to set aside some time once in a while and do focused practice in order to get better at something. An odd example, since I'm pretty sure we've all got a lot better at typing without really trying. I just did a test to find out, and it turns out that in the last fifteen years that I've spent not learning to type, I've gone from about 35 wpm to 81. Fifteen years ago, 81 wpm would have been a pretty impressive typing speed, but nowadays I guess it's pretty normal, since the whole world has got better at typing. It doesn't seem so long ago that people were still putting their typing speed on their resumes, but nowadays high-speed typing is taken for granted -- it's gone from being a skill to being a reflex, for most people. I'm not sure about programming, though. I'm sure it's possible to get better without really trying, but really trying will get you there faster. I guess the real difference is that typing is an "easy" skill where you can reach the maximum reasonable level of competence quite easily (who really needs more than 60 wpm?), whereas programming is a "hard" skill where there's far more to learn than you can possibly fit into one lifetime.

jauco 18y ago
I guess the articles author is not talking about strokes per minute but rather how well you're able to put your thoughts into words. That's a skill that's more on the same level as programming.
- hugh 18y ago
  In that example I would have thought "typing" just means, well, typing.
sofal 18y ago
My typing skills improved dramatically just by participating in flame wars on Battle.net over StarCraft skirmishes. Those were the days...

Tichy 18y ago

Does reading Hacker News count as training?

eru 18y ago
Too easy.