5 ms·

"Welcome to our team, here's the spec for our project, and here's the spec for our DSL. See you in a month."

adamsaleh 14y ago
Actually this is how it was when I started at my current position. We are doing web-testing in clojure, and in past year our little framework evolved into a DSL of a sorts. On one hand it is great, we a have consturct like (with-client [name connection & body]), that behind the scenes sets up a virtual machine, registers it as a client of our web-service and destroys it after commands in body are done. I can't imagine we would be doing setup and teardown by hand. On the other hand it took me a month to get into it (two weeks learning the language, two weeks messing around with the framework) ... and there are still lots of things only our lead-tester knows how to fix, after our devs decide to change something we were relying on for testing.
- lkrubner 14y ago
  >two weeks learning the language I am curious, did you already know the JVM? When I learned Clojure, I was also learning the JVM, and for me the JVM was much harder than Clojure. So I would say it took me 6 months to learn Clojure, but much of that time was the time it took to learn about the JVM and all the related Java weirdness. Either way, 2 weeks is very impressive.
  - adamsaleh 14y ago
    JVM? I knew Java, but most of what I did in java was using autocomplete in Netbeans and cursing Maven, when it didn't work. What really helped me that, we had "programing paradigm" course in college, where I learned haskell for 3 weeks, what was enough that anonymous functions, map, reduce and using lists for everything didn't feel new.
limmeau 14y ago
"and here is the spec for our in-house framework". "and here is the 1M LOC codebase, which was carefully crafted to avoid using any of the complicated frameworks; all you gotta know is the C standard library".
- anthonyb 14y ago
  Spec? For an in-house framework? Luxury!
  - limmeau 14y ago
    Did I say Spec? I meant the doxygen output of hundreds of classes with sparse one-line doccumments. Plus one outdated sequence diagram.
    - masklinn 14y ago
      One-line comment? What are you, a writer-librarian?
      - limmeau 14y ago
        It can be learned. Observe: //! \brief Transport diagnostic wrapper class TransportDiagnosticWrapper { (Actually, meaningful one-line comments are a lyric discipline of their own, related to haikus.)
        npsimons 14y ago
        You joke, but a tool I have seen lauded for being really "smart" at automatically generating doxygen comments does exactly that. I guess it at least saves the time of a human doing it by hand . . .
markokocic 14y ago
If you start a sentence with "Welcome to our team" and end it with "See you in a month." whatever you put in between, your company is doomed, and your team is highly dysfunctional.

Actually this is how it was when I started at my current position. We are doing web-testing in clojure, and in past year our little framework evolved into a DSL of a sorts. On one hand it is great, we a have consturct like (with-client [name connection & body]), that behind the scenes sets up a virtual machine, registers it as a client of our web-service and destroys it after commands in body are done. I can't imagine we would be doing setup and teardown by hand. On the other hand it took me a month to get into it (two weeks learning the language, two weeks messing around with the framework) ... and there are still lots of things only our lead-tester knows how to fix, after our devs decide to change something we were relying on for testing.

lkrubner 14y ago
>two weeks learning the language I am curious, did you already know the JVM? When I learned Clojure, I was also learning the JVM, and for me the JVM was much harder than Clojure. So I would say it took me 6 months to learn Clojure, but much of that time was the time it took to learn about the JVM and all the related Java weirdness. Either way, 2 weeks is very impressive.
- adamsaleh 14y ago
  JVM? I knew Java, but most of what I did in java was using autocomplete in Netbeans and cursing Maven, when it didn't work. What really helped me that, we had "programing paradigm" course in college, where I learned haskell for 3 weeks, what was enough that anonymous functions, map, reduce and using lists for everything didn't feel new.

limmeau 14y ago

"and here is the spec for our in-house framework". "and here is the 1M LOC codebase, which was carefully crafted to avoid using any of the complicated frameworks; all you gotta know is the C standard library".

anthonyb 14y ago
Spec? For an in-house framework? Luxury!
- limmeau 14y ago
  Did I say Spec? I meant the doxygen output of hundreds of classes with sparse one-line doccumments. Plus one outdated sequence diagram.
  - masklinn 14y ago
    One-line comment? What are you, a writer-librarian?
    - limmeau 14y ago
      It can be learned. Observe: //! \brief Transport diagnostic wrapper class TransportDiagnosticWrapper { (Actually, meaningful one-line comments are a lyric discipline of their own, related to haikus.)
      - npsimons 14y ago
        You joke, but a tool I have seen lauded for being really "smart" at automatically generating doxygen comments does exactly that. I guess it at least saves the time of a human doing it by hand . . .

markokocic 14y ago

If you start a sentence with "Welcome to our team" and end it with "See you in a month." whatever you put in between, your company is doomed, and your team is highly dysfunctional.