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> I don't think being able to faster write boilerplate is something worthwhile But do you believe people being slower at writing boilerplate is undesirable?
by airstrike 5y ago
> I don't think being able to faster write boilerplate is something worthwhile
But do you believe people being slower at writing boilerplate is undesirable?
- kyleee 5y agoIt may be desirable for boilerplate to be maximally painful if it forces our collective hands to cut down on boilerplate and innovate it away
- kevingadd 5y agoWho is realistically going to innovate the boilerplate out of Java if they're stuck using it at work?
- gridspy 5y agoThat, or any job where you're not permitted to make the sweeping changes required to resolve boilerplate. Many of my jobs had such restrictions.
- stelcodes 5y agoI mean, Clojure kinda does that
- amusedcyclist 5y agoLombok and most intellij features make java boilerplate pretty obselete.
- closeparen 5y agoThat’s a good plan if your language isn’t Go. For us I think tools to wrangle boilerplate are a lot more feasible than actually eliminating it.
- zomglings 5y agoif commentErr != nil { hn.Upvote("https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29017491") }
- verve_rat 5y agoIn my experience whenever someone tries to "innovate" away boilerplate they end up creating shitty abstractions that are inflexible, poorly documented, and unmaintained. Boilerplate generally exists for a reason, and it's not because the creator likes typing.
- chrsig 5y agoPossibly yes, if you're only contrasting it with being able to be faster. I mean, it's sort of a false dichotomy -- it's omitting a "default speed" for writing boilerplate that is neither enhanced nor impeded. the potential issue with an enhanced speed for writing boilerplate is that it means that there'll just be more and more boilerplate to maintain over time, and it's not clear what that cost over time will be. How much more effort will be expended to replace things in multiple places? It exacerbates existing issues of "these two things look almost the same, but someone manually modified one copy...should that change be propagated?" Meaning, it's essentially an ad-hoc code generator. Code generation can be a very useful technique (see protobufs), but without the ability to re-generate from a source? Perhaps a possible enhancement might be for copilot to keep track of all blurbs it generated and propose refactoring/modifying all copies?
- airstrike 5y ago> I mean, it's sort of a false dichotomy -- it's omitting a "default speed" for writing boilerplate that is neither enhanced nor impeded. I'm not sure. I think that understanding is omitting a "default amount" of boilerplate that will have to be written regardless of one's individual preference that is really a function of the language / framework of choice, the existing codebase and the problem at hand. Removing that boilerplate would be ideal but is not always possible given limited resources, time constraints and the usual inability to make sweeping changes to the codebase So we settle for the second best solution which is to automate away that tedious process (or short of that provide developers with tools to get it out of the way faster) so we can all focus on "real work"
- chrsig 5y agoI agree that there's some default amount of boilerplate that needs to be written -- but one isn't impeded by that -- it's just built into the task. An impedance would be something to adjust the status quo in a negative direction e.g., a hardware failure