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Hi William! I am reserving most of my replies for the comment section of my own blog, but I couldn't resist say hi to you. I am in fact sick of typing in type

by jmount 15y ago

Hi William! I am reserving most of my replies for the comment section of my own blog, but I couldn't resist say hi to you. I am in fact sick of typing in type labels (so strong type inference is great, it is just finally becoming available to us masses). Also I would like try defend refactoring. Those that don't think it is important have not seen it used well (there are a lot of trivial uses of refactoring). I remember pair programming with Brian Slesinsky (when the two of you were coaching). We wanted to change some deep functionality of the project. Brian slowed the moment down for a bit and then said something like: "we call this refactor method, then introduce this error here, fix it here and then call this last refactor to clean it up." He was definitely not only doing what the IDE supplied but thinking in a very deep way how to trick the IDE into correctly performing a big change it was not designed for.

gruseom 15y ago
I am reserving most of my replies for the comment section of my own blog I don't think you should post it here if you aren't prepared to discuss it here. That seems disrespectful to the community. For example, I'd like to hear your response to this objection: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3633596 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3633596.
- jmount 15y ago
  Not "unwilling to discuss it here," just trying not to post everything twice. Now as regard to that objection- I have also read that the empirical studies of defect rate seem to show that defect rate does not correlate with anything once you control for size (leading to the argument that you should decrease size at any cost). I haven't examined the studies or the nature of the code in them. My personal observation is that not all code bases are the same (even those with the same number of defects). Some code bases seem to have a brittle behavior where there is an unlimited reserved of subtle bugs that depend on particular circumstances to happen (so likely undercounted, so called mysterious crashes) and other code bases do not (they are rock solid). I don't think this is captured by just counting tracked defects (as a "mysterious crash" can one bug or many interacting). But, yes current industrial consensus is size is most important.
  - gruseom 15y ago
    Thanks for replying. "Current industrial consensus" isn't that size is most important - far from it, approximately nobody pays any attention to that. Programs are routinely built by slathering code and people are proud of how much they write instead of how little. Yet it seems to be what the evidence is telling us.

by jmount 15y ago

gruseom 15y ago

I am reserving most of my replies for the comment section of my own blog I don't think you should post it here if you aren't prepared to discuss it here. That seems disrespectful to the community. For example, I'd like to hear your response to this objection: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3633596 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3633596.

jmount 15y ago
Not "unwilling to discuss it here," just trying not to post everything twice. Now as regard to that objection- I have also read that the empirical studies of defect rate seem to show that defect rate does not correlate with anything once you control for size (leading to the argument that you should decrease size at any cost). I haven't examined the studies or the nature of the code in them. My personal observation is that not all code bases are the same (even those with the same number of defects). Some code bases seem to have a brittle behavior where there is an unlimited reserved of subtle bugs that depend on particular circumstances to happen (so likely undercounted, so called mysterious crashes) and other code bases do not (they are rock solid). I don't think this is captured by just counting tracked defects (as a "mysterious crash" can one bug or many interacting). But, yes current industrial consensus is size is most important.
- gruseom 15y ago
  Thanks for replying. "Current industrial consensus" isn't that size is most important - far from it, approximately nobody pays any attention to that. Programs are routinely built by slathering code and people are proud of how much they write instead of how little. Yet it seems to be what the evidence is telling us.