7 ms·

I just can’t find any relationship between the sins of software engineers he enumerates and the "best practices" he referenced in his title. In my experience be

by kirab 12y ago

I just can’t find any relationship between the sins of software engineers he enumerates and the "best practices" he referenced in his title. In my experience best practices actually make those sins less probable.

fmstephe 12y ago
As a java developer I can say that his list of sins very nearly is our list of best practices. I think that the programming culture has a big impact here. Yossi's complaints are typically about C++ programmers, and I can't comment on their culture directly. But I think Java and C++ both have "Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software" as a spiritual foundation. So I suspect they are depraved along similar lines. (Since it's hard to get tone across on a forum, I am being playful here. Although I am worn out by Java programming culture)
- deong 12y ago
  I used to work in a place that had a mix of Java and C or C++ projects going on, and different groups specializing in each. I always said I preferred dealing with the legacy C code than the new Java code. Function too long? I don't care. I can start at the top, read to the bottom, and understand what it's doing. If it actually is too long (rather than just longer than some new graduate's magic number k that is supposed to be the hard upper bound on function length), then I can quite easily break it up. I could take Java code written by the best minds in that half of the company yesterday, and have absolutely no idea what it did, how it worked, where the files were or what resources it needed. Nothing actually happened in the code that anyone at the company wrote, as far as I could tell. They spent all their time writing what look to me to be prayers to the gods of third party jar files asking them to do whatever function needed to be done. "Well, I need to get a list of customers sorted by last name. Those heathens over in C++ land would write a SQL query, but I have Spring, Hibernate, and SOAP, so instead, I'll edit a generated XML file to refer to another generated XML file to refer to another generated XML file to refer to another generated XML file to refer to another generated XML file to refer to another generated XML file to create an object creation factory to create an object that can read something from a generated XML file that loads another generated XML file that tells Hibernate to load four gigabytes of customer data which I need to then prune down to what I need by editing a generated XML file so that Hibernate can send 20 records to a SOAP library that reads a generated XML file that reads a generated XML file to write a few bits over the wire where the client can read a generated XML file that parses a generated XML file that reads a generated XML file before crashing because the client's JAX-WS jar was 0.0.0.0.0.0.2 iterations off from the server's JAX-WS jar. But at least I don't have to write a difficult and error prone for loop."
  - krisgenre 12y ago
    Java code can be hard to read if you are just using an editor. Its usually a must to use an IDE when working on a large Java project, they make things like finding stuff really easier. As with newer versions of Spring and Hibernate, you can mostly do with only annotations and zero xml configuration.
  - watwut 12y ago
    Getting "a list of customers sorted by last name" in hibernate does not require xml or anything like that. It is one java method with annotation containing order by query. It is considerably shorter then traditional non-hibernate version.
    - deong 12y ago
      I rather hoped that the rest of the text would have been a clue that I was exaggerating things slightly.
henrik_w 12y ago
Totally agree. I usually like what Yossi writes, but I don't agree with this. SW engineering best practices in my mind are all about writing clear, easy-to-understand code, keeping it as simple as possible - i.e. nothing like what he calls best practices.

by kirab 12y ago

fmstephe 12y ago

As a java developer I can say that his list of sins very nearly is our list of best practices. I think that the programming culture has a big impact here. Yossi's complaints are typically about C++ programmers, and I can't comment on their culture directly. But I think Java and C++ both have "Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software" as a spiritual foundation. So I suspect they are depraved along similar lines. (Since it's hard to get tone across on a forum, I am being playful here. Although I am worn out by Java programming culture)

deong 12y ago
I used to work in a place that had a mix of Java and C or C++ projects going on, and different groups specializing in each. I always said I preferred dealing with the legacy C code than the new Java code. Function too long? I don't care. I can start at the top, read to the bottom, and understand what it's doing. If it actually is too long (rather than just longer than some new graduate's magic number k that is supposed to be the hard upper bound on function length), then I can quite easily break it up. I could take Java code written by the best minds in that half of the company yesterday, and have absolutely no idea what it did, how it worked, where the files were or what resources it needed. Nothing actually happened in the code that anyone at the company wrote, as far as I could tell. They spent all their time writing what look to me to be prayers to the gods of third party jar files asking them to do whatever function needed to be done. "Well, I need to get a list of customers sorted by last name. Those heathens over in C++ land would write a SQL query, but I have Spring, Hibernate, and SOAP, so instead, I'll edit a generated XML file to refer to another generated XML file to refer to another generated XML file to refer to another generated XML file to refer to another generated XML file to refer to another generated XML file to create an object creation factory to create an object that can read something from a generated XML file that loads another generated XML file that tells Hibernate to load four gigabytes of customer data which I need to then prune down to what I need by editing a generated XML file so that Hibernate can send 20 records to a SOAP library that reads a generated XML file that reads a generated XML file to write a few bits over the wire where the client can read a generated XML file that parses a generated XML file that reads a generated XML file before crashing because the client's JAX-WS jar was 0.0.0.0.0.0.2 iterations off from the server's JAX-WS jar. But at least I don't have to write a difficult and error prone for loop."
- krisgenre 12y ago
  Java code can be hard to read if you are just using an editor. Its usually a must to use an IDE when working on a large Java project, they make things like finding stuff really easier. As with newer versions of Spring and Hibernate, you can mostly do with only annotations and zero xml configuration.
- watwut 12y ago
  Getting "a list of customers sorted by last name" in hibernate does not require xml or anything like that. It is one java method with annotation containing order by query. It is considerably shorter then traditional non-hibernate version.
  - deong 12y ago
    I rather hoped that the rest of the text would have been a clue that I was exaggerating things slightly.

henrik_w 12y ago

Totally agree. I usually like what Yossi writes, but I don't agree with this. SW engineering best practices in my mind are all about writing clear, easy-to-understand code, keeping it as simple as possible - i.e. nothing like what he calls best practices.