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When I first heard the maxim that an intelligent person should be able to hold two opposing thoughts at the same time, I was naive to think it meant weighing th

• codeflo 2y ago
  There’s also the effect that a certain code structure that’s clearer for a senior dev might be less clear for a junior dev and vice versa.
  • rob74 2y ago
    Or rather, senior devs have learned to care more for having clear code rather than (over-)applying principles like DRY, separation of concerns etc., while juniors haven't (yet)...
    • stahorn 2y ago
      When you thought you made "smart" solutions and many years later you have to go in and fix bugs in it, is usually when you learn this.
      • newswasboring 2y ago
        There is a human side to this which I am going through right now. The first full framework I made is proving to be developer unfriendly in the long run, I put more emphasis on performance than readability (performance was the KPI we were trying to improve at the time). Now I am working with people who are new to the codebase, and I observed they were hesitant to criticize it in front of me. I had to actively start saying "lets remove <frame work name>, its outdated and bad". Eventually I found it liberating, it also helped me detach my self worth from my work, something I struggle with day to day.
    • orwin 2y ago
      My 'principle' for DRY is : twice is fine, trice is worth an abstraction (if you think it has a small to moderate chance to happen again). I used to apply it no matter what, soi guess it's progress...
      • whstl 2y ago
        I really dislike how this principle ends up being used in practice. A good abstraction that makes actual sense is perfectly good even when it's used only once. On the other hand, the idea of deduplicating code by creating an indirection is often not worth it for long-term maintenance, and is precisely the kind of thing that will cause maintenance headaches and anti-patterns. For example: don't mix file system or low-level database access with your business code, just create a proper abstraction. But deduplicating very small fragments of same-abstraction-level can have detrimental effects in the long run.
        • ahoka 2y ago
          I think the main problem with these abstractions that they are merely indirections in most cases, limiting the usefulness to several use cases (sometimes to things that never going to be needed). To quote Dijsktra: "The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise."
        • n0w 2y ago
          I can't remember where I picked it up from, but nowadays I try to be mindful of when things are "accidentally" repeated and when they are "necessarily" repeated. Abstractions that encapsulate the latter tend to be a good idea regardless of how many times you've repeated a piece of code in practice.
          • codeflo 2y ago
            Exactly, but distinguishing the two that requires an excellent understanding of the problem space, and can’t at all be figured out in the solution space (i.e., by only looking at the code). But less experienced people only look at the code. In theory, a thousand repetitions would be fine if each one encodes an independent bit of information in the problem space.
    • JauntyHatAngle 2y ago
      I know it's overused, but I do find myself saying YAGNI to my junior devs more and more often, as I find they go off on a quest for the perfect abstraction and spend days yak shaving as a result.
      • silisili 2y ago
        Yes! I work with many folks objectively way younger and smarter than me. The two bad habits I try to break them of are abstractions and what ifs. They spend so much time chasing perfection that it negatively affects their output. Multiple times a day I find myself saying 'is that a realistic problem for our use case?' I don't blame them, it's admirable. But I feel like we need to teach YAGNI. Anymore I feel like a saboteur, polluting our codebase with suboptimal solutions. It's weird because my own career was different. I was a code spammer who learned to wrangle it into something more thoughtful. But I'm dealing with overly thoughtful folks I'm trying to get to spam more code out, so to speak.
        • reshlo 2y ago
          I’ve had the opposite experience before. As a young developer, there were a number of times where I advocated for doing something “the right way” instead of “the good enough way”, was overruled by seniors, and then later I had to fix a bug by doing it “the right way” like I’d wanted to in the first place. Doing it the right way from the start would have saved so much time.
          • spinningslate 2y ago
            This thread is a great illustration of the reality that there are no hard rules, judgement matters, and we don't always get things right. I'm pretty long-in-the-tooth and feel like I've gone through 3 stages in my career: 1. Junior dev where everything was new, and did "the simplest thing that could possibly work" because I wasn't capable of anything else (I was barely capable of the simple thing). 2. Mid-experience, where I'd learned the basics and thought I knew everything. This is probably where I wrote my worst code: over-abstracted, using every cool language/library feature I knew, justified on the basis of "yeah, but it's reusable and will solve lots of stuff in future even though I don't know what it is yet". 3. Older and hopefully a bit wiser. A visceral rejection of speculative reuse as a justification for solving anything beyond the current problem. Much more focus on really understanding the underlying problem that actually needs solved: less interest in the latest and greatest technology to do that with, and a much larger appreciation of "boring technology" (aka stuff that's proven and reliable). The focus on really understanding the problem tends to create more stable abstractions which do get reused. But that's emergent, not speculative ahead-of-time. There are judgements all the way through that: sometimes deciding to invest in more foundational code, but by default sticking to YAGNI. Most of all is seeing my value not as weilding techno armageddon, but solving problems for users and customers. I still have a deep fascination with exploring and understanding new tech developments and techniques. I just have a much higher bar to adopting them for production use.
    • sgu999 2y ago
      good devs*, not all senior devs have learned that, sadly. As a junior dev I've worked under the rule of senior devs who were over-applying arbitrary principles, and that wasn't fun. Some absolute nerds have a hard time understanding where their narrow expertise is meant to fit, and they usually don't get better with age.
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    • zeroq 2y ago
      As someone who recently had to go over a large chunk of code written by myself some 10-15 years ago I strongly agree with this sentiment. Despite being a mature programmer already at that time, I found a lot of magic and gotchas that were supposed to be, and felt at the time, super clever, but now, without a context, or prior version to compare, they are simply overcomplicated.
    • devjab 2y ago
      I find that it’s typically the other way around as things like DRY, SOLID and most things “clean code” are hopeless anti-patterns peddled by people like Uncle Bob who haven’t actually worked in software development since Fortran was the most popular language. Not that a lot of these things are bad as a principle. They come with a lot of “okish” ideas, but if you follow them religiously you’re going to write really bad code. I think the only principle in programming I think can be followed at all times is YAGNI (you aren’t going to need it). I think every programming course, book, whatever should start by telling you to never, ever, abstract things before you absolutely can’t avoid it. This includes DRY. It’s a billion times better to have similar code in multiple locations that are isolated in their purpose, so that down the line, two-hundred developers later you’re not sitting with code where you’ll need to “go to definition” fifteen times before you get to the code you actually need to find. Of course the flip-side is that, sometimes, it’s ok to abstract or reuse code. But if you don’t have to, you should never ever do either. Which is exactly the opposite of what junior developers do, because juniors are taught all these “hopeless” OOP practices and they are taught to mindlessly follow them by the book. Then 10 years later (or like 50 years in the case of Uncle Bob) they realise that functional programming is just easier to maintain and more fun to work with because everything you need to know is happening right next to each other and not in some obscure service class deep in some ridiculous inheritance tree.
      • int_19h 2y ago
        The problem with repeating code in multiple places is that when you find a bug in said code, it won't actually be fixed in all the places where it needs to be fixed. For larger projects especially, it is usually a worthwhile tradeoff versus having to peel off some extra abstraction layers when reading the code. The problems usually start when people take this as an opportunity to go nuts on generalizing the abstraction right away - that is, instead of refactoring the common piece of code into a simple function, it becomes a generic class hierarchy to cover all conceivable future cases (but, somehow, rarely the actual future use case, should one arise in practice). Most of this is just cargo cult thinking. OOP is a valid tool on the belt, and it is genuinely good at modelling certain things - but one needs to understand why it is useful there to know when to reach for it and when to leave it alone. That is rarely taught well (if at all), though, and even if it is, it can be hard to grok without hands-on experience.
  • kolinko 2y ago
    I bumped into that issue, and it caused a lot of friction between me and 3 young developers I had to manage. Ideas on how to overcome that?
    • whstl 2y ago
      Teaching. I had this problem with an overzealous junior developer and the solution was showing some different perspectives. For example John Ousterhout's A Philosophy of Software Design.
      • thelastparadise 2y ago
        I tried this but they just come back with retorts like "OK boomer" which tends to make the situation even worse. How do you respond to that?
        • cbrozefsky 2y ago
          Fire them.
        • garblegarble 2y ago
          The sibling comment says "fire them". That sounds glib, but it's the correct solution here. From what you've described, you have a coworker who is not open to learning and considering alternative solutions. They are not able to defend their approach, and are instead dismissive (and using an ageist joke to do it). This is toxic to a collaborative work environment. I give some leeway to assholes who can justify their reasoning. Assholes who just want their way because it's their way aren't worth it and won't make your product better.
        • yodsanklai 2y ago
          This is a discriminatory statement and it should be taken seriously.
        • jerf 2y ago
          To be honest, at the point where they are being insulting I also agree firing them is a very viable alternative. However, to answer the question more generally, I've had some success first acknowledging that I agree the situation is suboptimal, and giving some of the reasons. These reasons vary; we were strapped for time, we simply didn't know better yet, we had this and that specific problem to deal with, sometimes it's just straight up "yeah I inherited that code and would never have done that", honestly. I then indicate my willingness to spend some time fixing the issues, but make it clear that there isn't going to be a Big Bang rewriting session, but that we're going to do it incrementally, with the system working the whole time, and they need to conceive of it that way. (Unless the situation is in the rare situation where a rewrite is needed.) This tends to limit the blast radius of any specific suggestion. Also, as a senior engineer, I do not 100% prioritize "fixing every single problem in exactly the way I'd do it". I will selectively let certain types of bad code through so that the engineer can have experience of it. I may not let true architecture astronautics through, but as long as it is not entirely unreasonable I will let a bit more architecture than perhaps I would have used through. I think it's a common fallacy of code review to think that the purpose of code review is to get the code to be exactly as "I" would have written it, but that's not really it. Many people, when they see this degree of flexibility, and that you are not riding to the defense of every coding decision made in the past, and are willing to take reasonable risks to upgrade things, will calm down and start working with you. (This is also one of the subtle reasons automated tests are super super important; it is far better for them to start their refactoring and have the automated tests explain the difficulties of the local landscape to them than a developer just blathering.) There will be a set that do not. Ultimately, that's a time to admit the hire was a mistake and rectify it appropriately. I don't believe in the 10x developer, but not for the usual egalitarian reasons... for me the problem is I firmly, firmly believe in the existence of the net-negative developer, and when you have those the entire 10x question disappears. Net negative is not a permanent stamp, the developer has the opportunity to work their way out of it, and arguably, we all start there both as a new developer and whenever we start a new job/position, so let me sooth the egalitarian impulse by saying this is a description of someone at a point in time, not a permanent label to be applied to anyone. Nevertheless, someone who insists on massive changes, who deploys morale-sapping insults to get their way, whose ego is tied up in some specific stack that you're not using and basically insists either that we drop everything and rewrite now "or else", who one way or another refuses to leave "net negative" status... well, it's time to take them up on the "or else". I've exaggerated here to paint the picture clearly in prose, but, then again, of the hundreds of developers I've interacted with to some degree at some point, there's a couple that match every phrase I gave, so it's not like they don't exist at all either.
• skummetmaelk 2y ago
  That doesn't seem like holding two opposing thoughts. Why is balancing contradictory actions to optimize an outcome different to weighing pros and cons?
  • mihaic 2y ago
    What I meant to say was that when people encounter contradictory statements like "always inline one-time functions" and "breakdown functions into easy to understand blocks", they try to only pick one single rule, even if they consider the pros and cons of each rule. After a while they consider both rules as useful, and will move to a more granular case-by-base analysis. Some people get stuck at rule-based thinking though, and they'll even accuse you of being inconsistent if you try to do case-by-case analysis.
• mjburgess 2y ago
  To a certain sort of person, conversation is a game of arriving at these antithesis statements: * Inlining code is the best form of breaking up code. * Love is evil. * Rightwing populism is a return to leftwing politics. * etc. The purpose is to induce aporia (puzzlement), and hence make it possible to evaluate apparent contradictions. However, a lot of people resent feeling uncertain, and so, people who speak this way are often disliked.
• leoh 2y ago
  You are probably reaching for Hegel’s concept of dialectical reconciliation
  • mihaic 2y ago
    Not sure, didn't Hegel say that there should be a synthesis step at some point? My view is that there should never be a synthesis when using these principles as tools, as both conflicting principles need to always maintain opposites. So, more like Heraclitus's union of opposites maybe if you really want to label it?
    • greenie_beans 2y ago
      the synthesis would be the outcome maybe? writing code that doesn't follow either rule strictly: > Concretely related to the topic, I've often found myself inlining short pieces of one-time code that made functions more explicit, while at other times I'll spend days just breaking up thousand line functions into simpler blocks just to be able to follow what's going on. In both cases I was creating inconsistencies that younger developers nitpick -- I know I did.
• peepee1982 2y ago
  That's exactly what I try to do. I think it's an unpopular opinion though, because there are no strict rules that can be applied, unlike with pure ideologies. You have to go by feel and make continuous adjustments, and there's no way to know if you did the right thing or not, because not only do different human minds have different limits, but different challenges don't tax every human mind to the same proportional extent. I get the impressions that programmers don't like ambiguity in general, let alone in things they have to confront in real life.
  • mr_toad 2y ago
    > there are no strict rules that can be applied The rules are there for a reason. The tricky part is making sure you’re applying them for that reason.
    • peepee1982 2y ago
      I don't know what your comment has to do with my comment.
• tomohawk 2y ago
  What makes an apprentice successful is learning the rules of thumb and following them. What makes a journeyman successful is sticking to the rules of thumb, unless directed by a master. What makes a master successful is knowing why the rules of thumb exist, what their limits are, when to not follow them, and being able to make up new rules.
• moss2 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • navane 2y ago
    So this maxim can both be used for good and for bad. Extra points for this maxim.
    • wrasee 2y ago
      A metamaxim?
  • echelon 2y ago
    As a tool, it's a wedge to break indoctrination and overcome bias. It leads to more pragmatic and less ideological thinking. The subject is compelled to contrast opposing views and consider the merits of each. Any use by ideological groups twists the purpose of the phrase on its head. The quote encourages thinking and consideration. You'd have to turn off your brain for this to have the opposite effect.
    • darkwater 2y ago
      > Any use by ideological groups twists the purpose of the phrase on its head. The quote encourages thinking and consideration. You'd have to turn off your brain for this to have the opposite effect. Well, it would not be too surprising that it can be used to, for example, make people think that they can trust science and also believe in some almighty, unexplainable by science divine entity.
      • desdenova 2y ago
        You can trust science, but science doesn't cover all of reality. My imaginary friend does, buy my magic book.
      • asenchi 2y ago
        Thoughts like this miss the purpose and significance of the maxim being discussed. Science doesn't disprove an "almighty, unexplainable divine entity" any more than an "almighty, unexplainable divine entity" could also provide science as a means to understand the nature of things. Careful you don't fall into the trap of indoctrination. :)
• hibernator149 2y ago
  Wait, isn't that just Doublethink from 1984? Holding two opposing thoughts is a sign that your mental model of the world is wrong and that it needs to be fixed. Where have you heard that maxim?
  • HKH2 2y ago
    It's not referring to cognitive dissonance.
  • perrygeo 2y ago
    No you've got it completely backwards. Reality has multiple facets (different statements, all of which can be true) and a mental model that insists on a singular judgement is reductionist, missing the forest for the trees. Light is a wave and a particle. People are capable of good and bad. The modern world is both amazing and unsustainable. etc. Holding multiple truths is a sign that you understand the problem. Insisting on a singular judgement is a sign that you're just parroting catchy phrases as a short cut to thinking; the real world is rarely so cut and dry.
• ragnese 2y ago
  > My goal in most cases now is to optimize code for the limits of the human mind (my own in low-effort mode) and like to be able to treat rules as guidelines. The trouble is how can you scale this to millions of developers, and what are those limits of the human mind when more and more AI-generated code will be used? I think the truth is that we just CAN'T scale that way with the current programming languages/models/paradigms. I can't PROVE that hypothesis, but it's not hard to find examples of big software projects with lots of protocols, conventions, failsafes, QA teams, etc, etc that are either still hugely difficult to contribute to (Linux kernel, web browsers, etc) or still have plenty of bugs (macOS is produced by the richest company on Earth and a few years ago the CALCULATOR app had a bug that made it give the wrong answers...). I feel like our programming tools are pretty good for programming in the small, but I suspect we're still waiting for a breakthrough for being able to actually make complex software reliably. (And, no, I don't just mean yet another "framework" or another language that's just C with a fancier type system or novel memory management) Just my navel gazing for the morning.
  • austin-cheney 2y ago
    I suppose that depends on the language and the elegance of your programming paradigm. This is where primitive simplicity becomes important, because when your foundation is composed of very few things that are not dependent upon each other you can scale almost indefinitely in every direction. Imagine you are limited to only a few ingredients in programming: statements, expressions, functions, objects, arrays, and operators that are not overloaded. That list does not contain classes, inheritance, declarative helpers, or a bunch of other things. With a list of ingredients so small no internal structure or paradigm is imposed on you, so you are free to create any design decisions that you want. Those creative decisions about the organization of things is how you dictate the scale of it all. Most people, though, cannot operate like that. They claim to want the freedom of infinite scale, but they just need a little help. With more help supplied by the language, framework, whatever the less freedom you have to make your own decisions. Eventually there is so much help that all you do as a programmer is contend with that helpful goodness without any chance to scale things in any direction.
  • twh270 2y ago
• grbsh 2y ago
  > limits of the human mind when more and more AI-generated code will be used We already have a technology which scales infinitely with the human mind: abstraction and composition of those abstractions into other abstractions. Until now, we’ve focused on getting AI to produce correct code. Now that this is beginning to be successful, I think a necessary next step for it to be useful is to ensure it produces well-abstracted and clean code (such that it scales infinitely)
• defaultcompany 2y ago
  > My goal in most cases now is to optimize code for the limits of the human mind (my own in low-effort mode) I think you would appreciate the philosophy of the Grug Brained Developer: https://grugbrain.dev https://grugbrain.dev
• gspencley 2y ago
  My intro to programming was that I wanted to be a game developer in the 90s. Carmack and the others at Id were my literal heroes. Back then, a lot of code optimizations was magic to me. I still just barely understand the famous inverse square root optimization in the Quake III Arena source code. But I wanted to be able to do what those guys were doing. I wanted to learn assembly and to be able to drop down to assembly and to know where and when that would help and why. And I wasn't alone. This is because these optimizations are not obvious. There is a "mystique" to them. Which makes it cool. So virtually ALL young, aspiring game programmers wanted to learn how to do this crazy stuff. What did the old timers tell us? Stop. Don't. Learn how to write clean, readable, maintainable code FIRST and then learn how to profile your application in order to discover the major bottlenecks and then you can optimize appropriately in order of greatest impact descending. If writing the easiest code to maintain and understand also meant writing the most performant code, then the concept of code optimization wouldn't even exist. The two are mutually exclusive, except in specific cases where it's not and then it's not even worth discussing because there is no conflict. Carmack seems to acknowledge this in his email. He realizes that inlining functions needs to be done with careful judgment, and the rationale is both performance and bug mitigation. But that if inlining were adopted as a matter of course, a policy of "always inline first", the results would quickly be an unmaintainable, impossible to comprehend mess that would swing so far in the other direction that bugs become more prominent because you can't touch anything in isolation. And that's the bane of software development: touch one thing and end up breaking a dozen other things that you didn't even think about because of interdependence. So we've come up with design patterns and "best practices" that allow us to isolate our moving parts, but that has its own set of trade-offs which is what Carmack is discussing. Being a 26 year veteran in the industry now (not making games btw), I think this is the type of topic that you need to be very experienced to be able to appreciate, let alone to be able to make the judgment calls to know when inlining is the better option and why.
• tetha 2y ago
  I had exactly this discussion today in an architectural discussion about an infrastructure extension today. As our newest team member noted, we planned to follow the reference architecture of a system in some places, and chose not to follow the reference architecture in other places. And this led to a really good discussion pulling the reference architecture of this system apart and understanding what it optimizes for (resilience and fault tolerance), what it sacrifices (cost, number of systems to maintain) and what we need. And yes, following the reference architecture in one place and breaking it in another place makes sense. And I think that understanding the different options, as well as the optimization goals setting them apart, allows you to make a more informed decision and allows you to make a stronger argument why this is a good decision. In fact, understanding the optimization criteria someone cares about allows you to avoid losing them in topics they neither understand nor care about. For example, our CEO will not understand the technical details why the reference architecture is resilient, or why other choices are less resilient. And he would be annoyed about his time being wasted if you tried. But he is currently very aware of customer impacts due to outages. And like this, we can offer a very good argument to invest money in one place for resilience, and why we can save money in other places without risking a customer impact. We sometimes follow rules, and in other situations, we might not.
  • mandevil 2y ago
    Yes, and it is the engineering experience/skill to know when to follow the "rules" of the reference architecture, and when you're better off breaking them, that's the entire thing that makes someone a senior engineer/manager/architect whatever your company calls it.
  • jschrf 2y ago
    Your newest team member sounds like someone worth holding onto.
• lifeisstillgood 2y ago
  I often Bang on about “software is a new form of literacy”. And this I feel is a classic example - software is a form of literacy that not only can be executed by a CPU but also at the same time is a way to transmit concepts from one humans head to another (just like writing) And so asking “will AI generated code help” is like asking “will AI generated blog spam help”? No - companies with GitHub copilot are basically asking how do I self-spam my codebase It’s great to get from zero to something in some new JS framework but for your core competancy - it’s like outsourcing your thinking - always comes a cropper (Book still being written)
  • debit-freak 2y ago
    I think a lot of the traditional teachings of "rhetoric" can apply to coding very naturally—there's often practically unlimited ways to communicate the same semantics precisely, but how you lay the code out and frame it can make the human struggle to read it straightforward to overcome (or near-impossible, if you look at obfuscation).
  • davidw 2y ago
    > is a way to transmit concepts from one humans head to another (just like writing) That's almost its primary purpose in my opinion... the CPU does not care about Ruby vs Python vs Rust, it's just executing some binary code instructions. The code is so that other people can change and extend what the system is doing over time and share that with others.
    • rileymat2 2y ago
      I get your point, but often the binary code instructions between those is vastly different.
      • davidw 2y ago
        The fact that we work with the high level languages rather than the binary code, despite all their inefficiencies, speaks to the human aspect being pretty important in the equation.
• j7ake 2y ago
  To make an advance in a field, you must simultaneously believe in what’s currently known as well as distrust that the paradigm is all true. This gives you the right mindset to focus on advancing the field in a significant way. Believing in the paradigm too much will lead to only incremental results, and not believing enough will not provide enough footholds for you to work on a problem productively.
• hnuser123456 2y ago
  On a positive note, most AI-gen code will follow a style that is very "average" of everything it's seen. It will have its own preferred way of laying out the code that happens to look like how most people using that language (and sharing the code online publicly), use it.
• SoftTalker 2y ago
  > other times I'll spend days just breaking up thousand line functions into simpler blocks just to be able to follow what's going on Absolutely, I'll break up a long block of code into several functions, even if there is nowhere else they will be called, just to make things easier to understand (and potentially easier to test). If a function or procedure does not fit on one screen, I will almost always break it up. Obviously "one screen" is an approximation, not all screens/windows are the same size, but in practice for me this is about 20-30 lines.
• hinkley 2y ago
  That’s undoubtedly a Zelda Fitzgerald quote (her husband plagiarized her shamelessly). As a consequence of the Rule of Three, you are allowed to have rules that have one exception without having to rethink the law. All X are Y except for Z. I sometimes call this the Rule of Two. Because it deserves more eyeballs than just being a subtext of another rule.
• xnx 2y ago
  > I was creating inconsistencies that younger developers nitpick Obligatory: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" Continued because I'd never read the full passage: "... adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance: An Excerpt from Collected Essays, First Series
• JamesBarney 2y ago
  My go to heuristic for how to break up code is white board or draw up in lucidchart your solution to explain it to another dev. If your methods don't match the whiteboard refactor.