3 ms·

I'm not sure that's true, when I look at the code bases of some of the most productive coders I can think of (John Carmack and the Doom and Quake code bases for

I'm not sure that's true, when I look at the code bases of some of the most productive coders I can think of (John Carmack and the Doom and Quake code bases for example), they tend to be fairly conservative with how much they abstract things. There's a lot of very thoughtful data structure usage (git is another good example of this) and diligence in maintaining a coding standard (which generally has little to do with formatting), but most of the code seems to be more concrete and task focused rather than abstract. I think Casey Muratori has a good way of thinking about this, with his concept of "semantic compression" ( https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0015 https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0015 ). To me that's a lot more valuable than the ideas that you get in say something like Clean Code (which in my opinion, the popularity of that book has been a disaster for the industry)

wvenable 3y ago
I'm positive they don't have much in the way of duplicated code. Abstraction can be as simple as a function. It seems odd to give really good examples of abstraction and then sort of do a No true Scotsman argument on it. "It can't be abstraction because it's not terrible."
- Kapura 3y ago
  so your argument is, "you've got to write functions, therefore abstraction is always good" ? yeah man i don't start in main() and never write another function ever again. You got me. But I also don't aggressively police duplication, accepting that I would always rather see what's happening without file-hopping. The correct abstractions will simplify code, and they will seem obvious (even if just in retrospect). Abstractions that force me to continually re-frame the problem i am trying to solve in terms of another's use case are antithetical to writing the sort of code that I do.
  - wvenable 3y ago
    You don't have to write functions. Have you ever seen a 10,000 line code that was just a single function -- I have. It also had nested if statements 5 levels deep to handle all sorts of logic with lots of duplication. It was unmaintainable. Yet it did meaningful work and it could have been refactored to a fraction of the size and do the same work. But, to be honest, when I had to fix it I just went it and fixed in the 20 places that needed changing because it was impossible to follow. You like good abstractions and you hate bad abstractions. I couldn't agree with that more.
coliveira 3y ago
There are useful abstractions and useless abstractions. A lot of the GoF designs are bad abstractions (if used indiscriminately) and clutches for bad languages. However, using problem-focused abstractions is a big time saving strategy.

wvenable 3y ago

I'm positive they don't have much in the way of duplicated code. Abstraction can be as simple as a function. It seems odd to give really good examples of abstraction and then sort of do a No true Scotsman argument on it. "It can't be abstraction because it's not terrible."

Kapura 3y ago
so your argument is, "you've got to write functions, therefore abstraction is always good" ? yeah man i don't start in main() and never write another function ever again. You got me. But I also don't aggressively police duplication, accepting that I would always rather see what's happening without file-hopping. The correct abstractions will simplify code, and they will seem obvious (even if just in retrospect). Abstractions that force me to continually re-frame the problem i am trying to solve in terms of another's use case are antithetical to writing the sort of code that I do.
- wvenable 3y ago
  You don't have to write functions. Have you ever seen a 10,000 line code that was just a single function -- I have. It also had nested if statements 5 levels deep to handle all sorts of logic with lots of duplication. It was unmaintainable. Yet it did meaningful work and it could have been refactored to a fraction of the size and do the same work. But, to be honest, when I had to fix it I just went it and fixed in the 20 places that needed changing because it was impossible to follow. You like good abstractions and you hate bad abstractions. I couldn't agree with that more.

coliveira 3y ago

There are useful abstractions and useless abstractions. A lot of the GoF designs are bad abstractions (if used indiscriminately) and clutches for bad languages. However, using problem-focused abstractions is a big time saving strategy.