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“Reasoning about code” is a scam

nathias 6y ago
Quite poorly reasoned, the author errs by not understanding the difference between thinking and reasoning. Reason has a long philosophical tradition but simplified for this context reasoning is thinking with reasons, so if something is easier to reason about it is providing your with more explicit reasons for why things are happening, regardless of the paradigm and style. Is that necessarily better? No, but in most contexts it is. Can it be used deceptively, yes, everything can.
mrkeen 6y ago
The author did not define what he meant by reasoning about code other than calling it a synonym for "thinking about code". Is it a scam to think about code, fellas? I'll provide some examples: * Does code this terminate? * Does this method produce expected output for all possible inputs? * Does this code produce the same output when given the same input? * Does this method leave the system in a bad state if it is cancelled partway through? * Can this method be inlined? * Can this method throw an exception? * Does this method use all of its parameters? * Why did this method not do what I expected it to do? * My tests passed, does that mean my code does what I want it to do? Is it a "scam" to ask any of the above questions? > effort that could better be focussed on checking whether your understanding of the problem is indeed correct, or needs updating. Checking? I checked the code. It looks like code. Did you want me to think about it too? > This points to a need for code to be deletable way faster than it needs to be thought about. I can delete code pretty quickly. I have tools that help me to scam about whether it's safe to delete or not. > choice of programming language is arbitrary Oof. Brainfuck it is, then.
angry_octet 6y ago
Posts from sicpers.info are submitted multiple times by approximately the same set of user handles. Nothing wrong with that kind of self promotion really except that it's low quality ranting. I would guess that these users, from their enormous karma and (admittedly a biased metric) that fact that I cannot recall them from reading posts, have an automated submission system (to harvest karma). https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=sicpers.info https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=sicpers.info

Quite poorly reasoned, the author errs by not understanding the difference between thinking and reasoning. Reason has a long philosophical tradition but simplified for this context reasoning is thinking with reasons, so if something is easier to reason about it is providing your with more explicit reasons for why things are happening, regardless of the paradigm and style. Is that necessarily better? No, but in most contexts it is. Can it be used deceptively, yes, everything can.

mrkeen 6y ago

The author did not define what he meant by reasoning about code other than calling it a synonym for "thinking about code". Is it a scam to think about code, fellas? I'll provide some examples: * Does code this terminate? * Does this method produce expected output for all possible inputs? * Does this code produce the same output when given the same input? * Does this method leave the system in a bad state if it is cancelled partway through? * Can this method be inlined? * Can this method throw an exception? * Does this method use all of its parameters? * Why did this method not do what I expected it to do? * My tests passed, does that mean my code does what I want it to do? Is it a "scam" to ask any of the above questions? > effort that could better be focussed on checking whether your understanding of the problem is indeed correct, or needs updating. Checking? I checked the code. It looks like code. Did you want me to think about it too? > This points to a need for code to be deletable way faster than it needs to be thought about. I can delete code pretty quickly. I have tools that help me to scam about whether it's safe to delete or not. > choice of programming language is arbitrary Oof. Brainfuck it is, then.

angry_octet 6y ago

Posts from sicpers.info are submitted multiple times by approximately the same set of user handles. Nothing wrong with that kind of self promotion really except that it's low quality ranting. I would guess that these users, from their enormous karma and (admittedly a biased metric) that fact that I cannot recall them from reading posts, have an automated submission system (to harvest karma). https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=sicpers.info https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=sicpers.info