> Glue isn’t some kind of computational waste; it’s what holds our systems together. Glue development is software development. My take is: glue code is just “

> Glue isn’t some kind of computational waste; it’s what holds our systems together. Glue development is software development. My take is: glue code is just “obvious” code, as opposed to the less obvious code. The problem is that it’s not really obvious. That’s how you get “write-only” code. What’s obvious to one person isn’t to another, or even to that same person later on. This is why Java, a very verbose (“full of glue”) language, is so popular. People say “an ideal programming language would have no glue code, it would all be inferred by the compiler”. And it’s true that a good language and libraries can remove a lot of trivial boilerplate. But not all of it, because some of that “boilerplate” isn’t so trivial. Like, casting floats to integers. The cast is glue code. C and other languages truncate the float, so it gets floored if positive and ceiled if negative. But do you want that, or do you want to round the float or ceil it always? Or is casting the float to an integer an indicator that you’re using the wrong variable? —- I think in the future, we will create AI to write a lot of ”glue” code fast, like GitHub copilot. Also, proven-equivalent (or heuristically 99% predicted equivalent) large-scale refactors. But even in the ideal scenario where we eliminate low-level glue code, we’ll just consider higher-level code “glue code”. Because, all code is glue code, to convert “what I want” to “what computer does”.