3 ms·

The book analogy you use isn't very accurate. Even if you merge chapters and paragraphs like that, you still read it sequentially. Just in a less comfortable wa

by fleddr 4y ago

The book analogy you use isn't very accurate. Even if you merge chapters and paragraphs like that, you still read it sequentially. Just in a less comfortable way. Which is not at all like a modern codebase that is modular, abstracted, etc. If you're new to a codebase, and want to understand one particular feature, you'd likely need to jump back and forth across 10 files. It's not far-fetched to say that makes it difficult to understand.

tharkun__ 4y ago
The thing is that if you just need to understand a specific part of something you will need to jump as well even if everything you needed for that one thing is written sequentially in one file. You will want to skip over implentation details of certain things to get the general picture first on a more abstract level. Let's say you have a simple endpoint that takes a list of comma separated inputs, parses them as numbers and spits back a sorted version of that. I don't want to see a version of that, which a compiler might have inlined. Including the implementation of the sorting algorithm. I only want to see a high level of abstraction version of it. Basically just something like (pseudo code in a non existent language) : fun endpoint(input): inputs[] = split(input, ',') numbers[] = parseAsIntegers(inputs) return quicksort(numbers) I can easily understand what this does and what the idea is behind this "algorithm" in 3 lines. If I had the "inlined" version of this I would have to manually identify each of these parts and potentially skip over tens to hundreds of lines. I think this is really a bit about trust. Do you trust that these named functions I am calling do what their name does? Does quicksort actually do a quicksort or has someone implemented bubble sort in there? Of course this is a minimal example and especially quicksort would probavly just be a library but imagine all of these were large complex pieces of our code base. Personally I am an advocate for using functions (methods or whatever your language calls them etc) and naming them properly and then trusting those names by default. I want to spend time making this nice and understandable and abstracted once when writing. Not every time someone reads it. As soon as something does not seem to behave in the way the name suggests I will then and only then go check the actual implementation and for example find out that parseAsIntegers actually also supports floats and quicksort is not actually quicksort but bubblesort and that is why this endpoint was slow etc.
- fleddr 4y ago
  You can easily understand what it does because you picked an example that is easy to understand :) This discussion often ends up in the extremes: inline everything versus abstract everything. I don't think anybody reasonable would opt for either of those extremes, we should focus on the very large middle ground where there's a lot of subjectivity. Trust me on this, I've been raised on the DRY dogma and all related architectural patterns in favor of abstraction. I've lived the life, for 2 decades. But I cannot ignore the outcomes. Most codebases are extremely difficult to understand and it's very painful to change things. As 90% of all software development is maintenance, that's a planetary-sized problem. This doesn't mean you should inline everything, it means sane choices. As a simple example, say you're using a literal in your code: (if orderAmount > 100000) This code is incredibly easy to read. Common convention says to put this in a constant, at the top of the file. Old me agrees, new me does not. For as long as it's the only occurrence of the value, it doesn't need abstraction. The only thing it would do is make the code more difficult to understand. The very eager abstracter might even put that constant in a separate file. The point of this example is to abstract based on real reuse, not imagined reuse. I'm not against abstraction only against unnecessary abstraction. A second example. Say you have a reusable UI component. A change request comes in that's pretty large and specific for one niche need. It kind of goes against the spirit of the initial purpose of the component but is still related enough to consider it in scope of the component. Old me might add a "toggle" to the component, after which it can render in two modes. Sometimes called a "god component". This approach sucks. It makes the component much more complicated and changing and testing it becomes a nightmare. Even older me would break down the component into smaller components and then "compose" them based on its mode. This is even worse, now you have to jump around many places whilst the sub components are never actually reused (pointless abstraction). New me says fuck it and splits the component in two. Allowing significant code duplication between both components. It's not as radical as it sounds, it's in fact incredibly comforting. Each component can easily be understood (less complexity) and making changes becomes far less stressful as your blast radius is tiny. Developers spent the vast majority of their time not coding, instead figuring out how something works and how to make a change that doesn't break anything.
  - tharkun__ 4y ago

by fleddr 4y ago

tharkun__ 4y ago

The thing is that if you just need to understand a specific part of something you will need to jump as well even if everything you needed for that one thing is written sequentially in one file. You will want to skip over implentation details of certain things to get the general picture first on a more abstract level. Let's say you have a simple endpoint that takes a list of comma separated inputs, parses them as numbers and spits back a sorted version of that. I don't want to see a version of that, which a compiler might have inlined. Including the implementation of the sorting algorithm. I only want to see a high level of abstraction version of it. Basically just something like (pseudo code in a non existent language) : fun endpoint(input): inputs[] = split(input, ',') numbers[] = parseAsIntegers(inputs) return quicksort(numbers) I can easily understand what this does and what the idea is behind this "algorithm" in 3 lines. If I had the "inlined" version of this I would have to manually identify each of these parts and potentially skip over tens to hundreds of lines. I think this is really a bit about trust. Do you trust that these named functions I am calling do what their name does? Does quicksort actually do a quicksort or has someone implemented bubble sort in there? Of course this is a minimal example and especially quicksort would probavly just be a library but imagine all of these were large complex pieces of our code base. Personally I am an advocate for using functions (methods or whatever your language calls them etc) and naming them properly and then trusting those names by default. I want to spend time making this nice and understandable and abstracted once when writing. Not every time someone reads it. As soon as something does not seem to behave in the way the name suggests I will then and only then go check the actual implementation and for example find out that parseAsIntegers actually also supports floats and quicksort is not actually quicksort but bubblesort and that is why this endpoint was slow etc.

fleddr 4y ago
You can easily understand what it does because you picked an example that is easy to understand :) This discussion often ends up in the extremes: inline everything versus abstract everything. I don't think anybody reasonable would opt for either of those extremes, we should focus on the very large middle ground where there's a lot of subjectivity. Trust me on this, I've been raised on the DRY dogma and all related architectural patterns in favor of abstraction. I've lived the life, for 2 decades. But I cannot ignore the outcomes. Most codebases are extremely difficult to understand and it's very painful to change things. As 90% of all software development is maintenance, that's a planetary-sized problem. This doesn't mean you should inline everything, it means sane choices. As a simple example, say you're using a literal in your code: (if orderAmount > 100000) This code is incredibly easy to read. Common convention says to put this in a constant, at the top of the file. Old me agrees, new me does not. For as long as it's the only occurrence of the value, it doesn't need abstraction. The only thing it would do is make the code more difficult to understand. The very eager abstracter might even put that constant in a separate file. The point of this example is to abstract based on real reuse, not imagined reuse. I'm not against abstraction only against unnecessary abstraction. A second example. Say you have a reusable UI component. A change request comes in that's pretty large and specific for one niche need. It kind of goes against the spirit of the initial purpose of the component but is still related enough to consider it in scope of the component. Old me might add a "toggle" to the component, after which it can render in two modes. Sometimes called a "god component". This approach sucks. It makes the component much more complicated and changing and testing it becomes a nightmare. Even older me would break down the component into smaller components and then "compose" them based on its mode. This is even worse, now you have to jump around many places whilst the sub components are never actually reused (pointless abstraction). New me says fuck it and splits the component in two. Allowing significant code duplication between both components. It's not as radical as it sounds, it's in fact incredibly comforting. Each component can easily be understood (less complexity) and making changes becomes far less stressful as your blast radius is tiny. Developers spent the vast majority of their time not coding, instead figuring out how something works and how to make a change that doesn't break anything.
- tharkun__ 4y ago