Programming: Doing it more vs. doing it better

https://kevinmartinjose.com/2019/04/08/programming-doing-it-more-vs-doing-it-better/

by lonesword • 7 years ago

367 216 7 years ago

kevinmartinjose.com

seba_dos1• 7 years ago

Three years later, I am still very much the apprentice.

Well, three years is really not a lot when it comes to developing an intuition. Just enough to grasp some basics.

a writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people

Yeah, I seem to recall Douglas Adams saying that the easier it is to read a text, the harder it was to write it.

At the beginning of my career I was constantly being praised for how fast I work. Well, I did stuff that worked, the effects were quickly visible, everyone was happy.

Even though there were code reviews to weed out the ugliest stuff, I wouldn't want to go back and maintain that software today :P

leggomylibro• 7 years ago

It might just be one of those universal truths: you need to understand something very well to explain how it works in simple terms.

Or as some smart person once said, "brevity is the soul of wit."

flukus2• 7 years ago

"If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter" - attributed to just about everyone: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/

pvh• 7 years ago

The character who speaks that line (Polonius) says so in the midst of a rambling and contradictory monologue, though we can certainly give Shakespeare credit for coining it.

skybrian• 7 years ago

I suspect there may be better ways to practice, rather than just doing it more? Some people put effort into memorization of commonly used idioms.

Here's another dubious analogy: when learning music, you do need to practice, but playing a song all the way through a bunch of times is a rather inefficient way to practice it.

munchbunny• 7 years ago

Create your own mental frameworks.

For example (personal mnemonic to cover my own blind spots) when designing my feature, consider:

* Flighting, especially protocol changes, will this change cause clients to be unable to talk to services?

* Risk: if this change breaks its service, what else breaks? What is the recovery path?

* Security: does this unintentionally relax or circumvent existing security boundaries? How much damage can an abuse of any code that writes/modifies do?

This is not a complete list on purpose. I use it to shore up the things I tend to forget to think about.

megous• 7 years ago

Other way of doing it more, is not just doing the same/similar thing again and again, but writing/reading large amount of very different programs. One day you do web app, other day you write a kernel driver, third day you write a scraping app, fourth day you write a tunel driver to get networking over USB, fifth day you reverse engineer some random piece of HW you have laying around and write alternative firmware for it to teach it new things, and so on. (it may not be days :))

Each of these things will branch out into different areas. You may need to write a text parser. You may need to design a USB protocol to relay packets. You may need to learn a processor architecture, calling convention, assembler mnemonics.

Over time you'll gain a lot of knowledge and you may be able to cross-apply plenty of it accross the domain boundaries.

sinuhe692• 7 years ago

I believe it’s almost identical to other fields: review, revise and reflection is the best way to learn. If someone want to improve his code quality, he should continuously review his code, best together with a “better” programmer. After finding the weak spots of his code, he should try to improve them by himself. To do so, he need to learn from good examples, exploring the reason behind through computer literature and experienced coders. After achieving a better version, he should reflect on his practice, how he might come to the solution himself in the first place, why did he choose the first solution and very soon he will start to recognize certain patterns. Regarding technical expertise, he should find where the challenge lies and start studying and practicing to make the knowledge sticks. He should go out of his comfort zone, challenge his ability and make mistakes. That is the only way to mastery.

tschellenbach• 7 years ago

For me the best analogy is a carpenter tightening screws. When you start out solving a particular problem part of the scope and required functionality is always not 100% clear. So you start out with an implementation which favors flexibility over things such as DRY or performant. As you learn more about the problem you start to optimize.

One of the biggest mistakes (the biggest one is probably not writing tests) I see junior engineers make is trying to optimize before fully understanding the required functionality.

mamon2• 7 years ago

> The best writers write much more slowly than everyone else, and the better they are, the slower they write.

By that metric George R.R. Martin is on track to be the greatest writer of all the time :)

felipemnoa• 7 years ago

Nah. He just got distracted by the trappings of being famous.

mamon2• 7 years ago

No, he had written himself into a corner at the end of the "Dance of Dragons", and then waited for the tv show screenwriters to help him figure out how to proceed from there - that's the most probable explanation I can come up with (hinted by some statements from his interviews).

mac010213• 7 years ago

No. I am (not having ever published a single book yet).

temdbej• 7 years ago

Part of me feels like bootcamps are effective for some because you will inevitably start getting it when you do it for 15+ hours a day every day for an extended period of time (which is more than you’d likely do on the job or in a more theoretical CS degree)

toomuchequate• 7 years ago

when you do it for 15+ hours a day every day for an extended period of time

Does this happen? I've programmed daily for ~11 hours/day between 2 companies, but at 15hrs/day I feel like there is diminishing returns.

opportune• 7 years ago

Why 11hr/day?

revskill2• 7 years ago

I use one rule: If it's easy to remove, then it's fine.

Because only then, i don't fear refactoring later.

So i'll get my goal: Easy refactoring for fun and profit.

Refactoring is often underrated. Actually i learnt more from refactoring rather than "just make it work perfectly since day 1.

qlk1123• 7 years ago

This reminds me the talk:

https://maximilianhoffmann.com/talks/programming/the-art-of-...

ravenstine2• 7 years ago

Most people talk about KISS, DRY, and YAGNI, but it's uncommon that I meet anyone who actually values replaceability. I don't even mind some repetition of code so long as groups of code aren't tightly-coupled and parts of an application can be easily replaced with rewritten versions.

I had a boss once who was dumbfounded that I actually wanted to refactor code. I guess a lot of people want to write things "perfect" from the very start, but that perfection seems to be a delusion most of the time. The best way to know perfection is to see it in hindsight.

d4mi3n• 7 years ago

This line of discussion reminds me of a great quote by Sandi Metz, who's pretty well known in the ruby community for harping on the topic. One thing I saw in a talk of hers that really stuck with me: Repetition is preferable to the wrong abstraction.

The first thing that's drilled into a new programmer is DRY. It's easy to understand and it works reasonably well. The next step up seems to be knowing when _not_ to roll stuff up, and how to tell when you're looking at a distinct piece of logic that needs to be reified into it's own entity or function.

EDIT: The Sandi Metz talk I mentioned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bZh5LMaSmE

Ma8ee3• 7 years ago

The main problem with repetion of code is that someone always forgets to change in at least one place when the requirements change.

It's more about having only one place where the logic is defined than anything else.

Wildgoose• 7 years ago

I usually state it as "Optimise Code for Deletion" - the best code is code that can be removed completely because that means it can be rewritten cleanly.

cheez4• 7 years ago

Indeed. I love it when the amount of money I make is tied to the quality of my code somehow. Easy to modify, easy to repurpose, easy to replace. These often make it possible to serve customers better -> more $$$

It's why I can't really take a regular job. There is no relationship between the quality of my work and what I get paid.

revskill2• 7 years ago

It's not much about relationship with $$$.

It's about how we could improve our life as a developer in general.

mikekchar2• 7 years ago

In my experience, even programmers are poor judges of good quality of code. Usually the criteria they are using to evaluate quality is: "Can I do what I want to do quickly?" This tends to boil down pretty quickly to "Is the code similar to code I've worked on recently?" Understanding the long term consequences of your actions is pretty tough and the ground keeps shifting under your feet. In that environment, having someone else evaluate your performance is really difficult. A manager who isn't actually working on the same code you are working on has absolutely no chance.

Lately, however, I've been trying to shift my approach to design when doing paid work: I try to make things that seem like they should be easy, easy. This is quite challenging in itself, but it's subtly different than trying to write high quality code. My goal is not so much highest possible throughput, or even programming ease. It's to make the process of programming less surprising to the paying customer. Of course, most paying customers have expectations far above what I could possibly achieve, but I see this has allowing myself room to improve.

I believe that if you are able to consistently achieve a result of "projects with this person tend to have fewer problems than projects without this person", it will translate into more $$$.

mac010213• 7 years ago

What nonregular job do you do? What kind of code do you deal with, for what kinds of customers? If you're a freelancer or consultant, how often do you end up revisiting code that you write a year or more later?

pdamoc• 7 years ago

If it's easy to remove, then you can think about the thing you can remove in isolation.

I think that the ability to partition code in such a way as to think about each bit in isolation is the mark of high quality code.

kragen4• 7 years ago

Someone who's been programming for three years is still a beginner, even though based on what he wrote here, Kevin is almost certainly a lot better than I was when I'd been programming for only three years.

I do find that a lot of programming stuff that used to be hard is easier for me now that I've been progrmaming for 38 years. But that doesn't mean I spend all my time doing things I can do without thinking, and it certainly doesn't mean I write code that doesn't need refactoring. Maybe my designs are better than they used to be — I think so — but often that's because I developed the design more incrementally through refactoring, rather than less incrementally by planning.

I do avoid a lot of errors by thinking through the consequences of a choice before taking action, in a way that I couldn't always do. But often that choice is specifically the choice to plan out a big design at the start of a project.

Also, though, what counts as "big" has changed for me. What I can hack together in an afternoon now might have taken me a week ten or fifteen years ago. So I can explore alternatives with less risk, in a way.

The author describes a lot of anxiety and guilt about doing things imperfectly. I think that's a big obstacle to improvement — other people can pick up on that and will be reluctant to give you feedback, and feedback from other people is a really fast way to improve. Also, it tends to shunt you into tasks that don't challenge you enough — it pushes you to avoid risk, and pushes other people to not ask you to do things that are at the limit of your abilities. This is precisely the dynamic Atwood was trying to combat by telling his story.

segmondy4• 7 years ago

Someone programming for 3 yrs is not a beginner, There are people programming at 3 yrs that are experts and will run circles around you and your 38 years. Some people really have the talent and put in the work to get good. In 2019, the mentorship is available via means of books, blogs, MOOC, youtube videos, conferences. What some folks can achieve in 3 yrs these days is really unbelievable. P/S, I have been hacking around the computer for 25yrs and think I'm a pretty good programmer too. But I have been impressed by some 2 yrs old & 3 yrs old experiences.

hhs6• 7 years ago

Interesting view. I'm learning, with about 8 months worth of knowledge and experience, and this is useful.

Did you notice any skills/traits in those people who were "unbelievable" in those 3 years? For instance, did they do "test driven development"? Also, did they keep good log habits?

fourseventy• 7 years ago

Programming is no different than any other discipline. You aren't going to be an expert in anything in only 3 years. Expert physician? Wont even be out of residency yet. Expert car mechanic? No way. Expert troll on hacker news? Maybe.

zjs• 7 years ago

To adopt a standard set of terminology — while fully acknowledging the limitations of the model — consider the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition.

I've met or worked with programmers with 3 years of experience who demonstrated competence, but never proficiency.

Some programmers have a strong natural intuition, and a competent programmer with a strong natural intuition may appear proficient. It's a tricky distinction, but important to recognize (especially for the programmers themselves and anyone mentoring them).

However, I think most people with 3 years of professional experience programming are advanced beginners reaching competence in a few specific areas.

abecedarius• 7 years ago

I can say from knowing Kragen that there are very few mortals who could run circles around him after 3 years of programming. Trying to imagine what they might be like, Christopher Strachey comes to mind -- it seems he impressed Alan Turing with his first program: https://history.computer.org/pioneers/strachey.html

jfoutz2• 7 years ago

I’m a little skeptical of 3 years making an expert, but I’ll stipulate it’s certainly possible for the reasons you mentioned.

I’m basically an old fart who has learned and forgotten a lot of stuff.

It really depends on what you need. I think the 3 year programmer will struggle when moving out of their experience.

The person with decades of practice have faced and failed at a dozen core cs problems. They’ll probably fail, but they can explain their state at any given moment.

The 3 year person will fail or fail and self destruct. It’s bad for everyone involved.

Every once in a while your lottery ticket wins. That has nothing to do with experience. A kid can win and good for them.

I guess my biased opinion is, you get a small advantage with people with our track records.

Newbs can do amazing stuff. Old farts, like us, can also do amazing stuff. You can’t know up front which to pick.

I dunno man, be good to your coworkers. They often end up being amazing.

jjeaff• 7 years ago

I call BS. Of course there are extreme outliers, like savants who are composing sonatas at age 3, but programming is a different animal.

Sure, someone with 3 years experience could easily be better in some narrow way, but any programmer worth anything after 30 years experience has forgotten more than a 3 year coder could have possibly learned if he was literally reading white papers all day long for those 3 years and retaining 100% of it. There just isn't enough time in 3 years to cover the breadth of knowledge needed to be "better" than someone decent who has 30 years experience.

jaabe• 7 years ago

I’ve been involved with hiring and I do part time work as an examiner for CS students, both those who go straight through their education, but also on diploma degrees where people upskill after having worked for a while. Kind of like a masters but at bachelor level.

I’ve seen one or two rockstar developers in my time, but even they, would have had trouble keeping up with the silver foxes I know.

I think young programmers have an easier time picking up X framework because they have more time. That’s not really as valuable as knowing computation though, and I frankly think a lot of the YouTube and MOOCs you praise are to blame for the general lack of CS knowledge among a lot of young programmers. Some of them (the college ones) are great introductionary courses, but the majority of MOOCs are amateurs teaching amateurs.

Maybe that works in software because software is in high demand. I mean, I build a RPA process in a few days by google programming. It certainly works, sure, but I also know that it could have been build a lot smarter and more efficient by someone who knew how. That’s the thing with software though, you can get by if you deliver something that works okish. At least until you have to work in a field like medical software, where you code is quite literally never allowed to fail. Because someone will die if it does. At that point you’ll want the 25 years of experience, every time, and if that’s true for medical software, I don’t see why it wouldn’t be true everywhere.

GordonS• 7 years ago

While I wouldn't have described myself as a beginner 3 years into my dev career, I certainly wouldn't have described myself as "expert" either - perhaps "advanced beginner" or "competent" would have been more appropriate.

For me, part of being "expert" is having broad experience, and that takes time. I think I would have used "expert" to describe my abilities after somewhere between 5 and 10 years.

dep_b2• 7 years ago

3 years of professional experience (and working on mobile applications as side gigs since 12 after their dad teached them how to do simple scripts with PHP at 8)

I can believe that.

kragen4• 7 years ago

There are people programming at 3 yrs that are experts and will run circles around you and your 38 years.

Yeah, there are; I've had the privilege of working with some of them. Probably they're even better now than they were then, though.

Izkata• 7 years ago

But that doesn't mean I spend all my time doing things I can do without thinking

But you do, or at least give the appearance of it:

Also, though, what counts as "big" has changed for me. What I can hack together in an afternoon now might have taken me a week ten or fifteen years ago. So I can explore alternatives with less risk, in a way.

I'm pretty sure that's the core of the idea. What you're doing in an afternoon looks just like being able to code without thinking to someone who would still take a week on it.

Cthulhu_• 7 years ago

While 3 years isn't much from a whole career perspective, I do believe those may be the three most important years, where you learn the most etc; I'm at about 10 years now, and don't feel like my level has significantly improved since then. I mean sure, I'm more experienced now and know more languages etc etc, but it's not like I'm 10x more productive or smart or better than I was 10 years ago.

bpicolo• 7 years ago

I suspect it depends on what you're building. Some problems in computing are drastically harder than others. Crud-like web applications, for example, are a well-trodden path now, but there are many applications of software that are not as straight forward.

WhompingWindows• 7 years ago

Is "10x more productive" even the right way to assess ourselves? I may be writing 1.5 times as much code as I was 2 years ago, but that code per line is much more sophisticated and gets a lot more work done, as I've learned more and more libraries and learned more tips/tricks/shortcuts.

dep_b2• 7 years ago

Weird, I feel I'm still improving a lot after 15 years but perhaps doing new stuff just keeps challenging what you know.

kragen4• 7 years ago

Being 10× more productive doesn't always feel like being 10× more productive. It can mean spending two days on a project which, seven years ago, you would have spent five days planning out, two days implementing, and eight days debugging; or you would have spent five days planning out, eight days just beginning to implement it the wrong way before someone pointed out that there was a library that already did what you needed, and then two days implementing the actual solution. It can look like half-assing things that need to be half-assed and thoroughly solving things that need to be thoroughly solved, instead of thoroughly solving everything. It can look like writing unit tests for your code that find the stupid bugs right after you write them when it's easy to fix them, instead of spending a bunch of time debugging the whole system when you do an integration test. Conversely, it can look like having less unit tests and therefore less code to change when you need to change something.

In the original "10×" study, some programmers were never able to finish the assignment at all (within the allotted time); probably they either couldn't figure out a workable attack on the problem (like Ron Jeffries on Sudoku: http://ravimohan.blogspot.com/2007/04/learning-from-sudoku-s...) or they wrote their code as cleverly as possible so that debugging it was beyond their ability. The 0.1× programmers in the study were the ones who almost didn't finish in the time that the researchers gave them. Presumably you can think of problems that you know how to solve now that you didn't know how to solve in any finite time seven years ago; presumably also you've learned how to avoid introducing bugs that you would have introduced then, costing you, again, unbounded time to diagnose.

Or maybe not. Maybe I just learn slowly. I've certainly worked with programmers with only a few years of experience who were better than I was; maybe they'd already hit their performance ceilings. But I doubt it.

bbbobbb2• 7 years ago

Also, though, what counts as "big" has changed for me. What I can hack together in an afternoon now might have taken me a week ten or fifteen years ago. So I can explore alternatives with less risk, in a way.

Could you elaborate on that? Maybe with an example of something that would fall into this "hack together in an afternoon" category?

I am still a beginner with less than 5 years of professional experience, but usually there seem to be rather large overhead to putting together new projects/services and getting everything up an running.

I can imagine being faster to proof of concepts in some environments (like a very involved framework - RoR/Django..), but not in others..

kragen4• 7 years ago

Well, one night in 2007 I wrote a 3-D rendering engine in JS http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/torus and one Friday night in 2013 I wrote a raytracer in C http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/aspmisc/my-very-first-raytra.... It took me until almost 4 AM, at which point I had reflection, color, and Lambertian shading from a tabular ASCII scene file format; a few days later I added procedural textures, a K-V-pair scene file format, specular highlights, and some more textures.

One night last year I wrote http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/usql.py, a toy SQL database supporting queries that join up to two tables. I would have implemented more of SQL, but I had set myself a two-hour time limit, and there isn't a parsing engine in the Python standard library.

Last month I wrote a Mandelbrot set renderer in Python, but it was slow, so I rewrote it in Lua using LuaJIT, which made it extremely fast. That took less than an hour, but I subsequently added some more features to it, so it represents maybe a few hours of work now: https://gitlab.com/kragen/bubbleos/blob/master/yeso/mand.lua

(That one will only run on Linux right now, or MacOS with X11, because it uses my GUI library Yeso, which I haven't ported to Quartz or GDI yet. The others are portable.)

aspmisc, dev3, and bubbleos are Git repos you can clone if you like. You may need to append /.git to the URL.

Those were all purely programming exercises, not drawing on frameworks and libraries and whatnot beyond the very basic stuff that comes with the languages in question (and, in the Mandelbrot case, the Yeso library), but of course I've also learned how to use a bunch of tools; I can spin up a new React project with an Express server and get something working in an hour or two, I can hack together a visualization with D3 in minutes, I can spin up a test server on Bithost in a few minutes, I can import stuff into SQLite or LevelDB in a few minutes, I can write a website scraper using Beautiful Soup and urllib2 in half an hour or so, and so on. So if there's something that's easy to do in SQLite, I don't waste my time doing it the hard way in Python, and vice versa.

I think there's enormous value in investing in tools like Docker to reduce the overhead in spinning up a new environment. There's also a lot to be said for improving low-level skills like typing, text editing, and writing and debugging simple code. It allows you to devote more attention, and more uninterrupted attention, to higher-level tasks like system design. But mostly programming more productively is not about writing code faster, although that sure helps; it's about writing less code.

segmondy4• 7 years ago

BTW, for anyone who wants to know more about the context, it's from the book "Art & Fear"

LarryMade2• 7 years ago

I think when you are starting some new concept, that you are learning as you go you need to just try to do your best of throwing stuff on the wall to get it to work, refactor a lot and keep grinding away. During this time you are building the "Big picture" of what it is.

Once you get a good enough big picture then you probably will start to realize where how to optimize the data and create better methods, but even there it still never stops, you now know the system, and can figure out what you need from the technology to construct a better platform.

The databases I've worked with for over 20 years have evolved as I have added more functionality, I have been able to identify where the priorities were as well as how to make it function more dynamically. I didn't really get the big picture for a decade as they were sill doing part of it analog and only requested (revealed to me) more functionality as the system grew more capable.

You may think you know it all now, but I would think there's still a lot more road to be covered after only three years.

flocial• 7 years ago

This was my first thought. I think beginners take better to volume but eventually we all hit a wall that takes more deliberate practice and deep reflection. Even then some concepts will be out of reach or take an exceptional teacher to break down. That doesn't even touch on the limits of individual abilities which we all face at some point.

innocentoldguy2• 7 years ago

Three years later, I am still very much the apprentice.

I used to think I’d get to the point where I could just sit down and breathe out perfect code, but that doesn’t happen. As I’ve thought about the reasons why, I came up with the following reasons:

1. Writing code is an act of inventing. If what I’m trying to build already existed, I could just go buy it and save myself a lot of time and money. It doesn’t exist though. I’m being paid to create something new and unique. This requires thought, trial and error, and multiple iterations to get right.

2. The software development landscape is not a static one. I used to build commercial buildings with my dad. Once I learned that studs should be set at 16” on center, how to measure and cut complex angles, and how to finish cement, I never had to learn those things again. They were pretty much static and I got to where I could breathe out a plumbed wall without thinking about it. In the software industry, developers are constantly having to learn new things. New languages become popular, companies jump on things like Kubernetes because everyone else is, the JavaScript community cranks out new libraries and frameworks on almost a daily basis. While the fundamentals of recursion, looping, and conditionals remain the same, the syntax, idioms, and best practices are constantly shifting. After 30 years of programming, I don’t think I’ll ever stop being an apprentice in at least some aspects of my career.

djmips• 7 years ago

Sometimes I wished I was a baker or a carpenter.

innocentoldguy2• 7 years ago

I do too, until payday.

externalreality2• 7 years ago

Programming is simple. Domains and interfaces are difficult. People over engineer stuff. People like to think they found the key to hidden wisdom. I believe I just summed up 90% of the difficulty with programming.

Just for the record procedural programming and functional programming are the only two styles of programming to me that make sense. Procedural because its how the machine model works and functional because its how a mathematical description of computation works. WTF is OOP (how the over active imagination of a child works I would reckon).

osrec• 7 years ago

OOP attempts to map to real objects, (and sometimes not so real objects). I know it's hated by functional purists, but it really does make it easier to think through problems. I personally don't hate it.

externalreality2• 7 years ago

Functional purists are the only one's who hate it. OOP by its very nature encourages developers to make bold abstractions prematurely (where prematurely is interchangeable with unnecessarily) and subjectively. Mean while the procedural programmer (Golang) has already finished the segment of the program having written one big function. If a piece of that big function is needed elsewhere she factors it out. Most of her program are simple loops and conditionals. Programs are easy. Programs are easy, why complicate something that is easy.

The machine should also guide the programmer as much as possible. I wish Golang had refinement types like Liquid Haskell or ATS. Some simple static analysis to cut down on crufty slow runtime test suites.

networkimprov• 7 years ago

Over-engineering drives up LoC counts, so there's (perhaps implict) incentive to engage in it -- either you or your colleagues perceive greater productivity.

Re OOP, it provides a method to model what you term a "domain".

tluyben2• 7 years ago

I love it how people hate and spit on the idea of code generation, but, in their daily lives, hit short cuts on their keyboard, especially in OOP environments, to generate 1000s of lines of cruft and even seem to enjoy that because it looks like you did so much... File after file appear with 10+ lines in it and checking into git looks like you did herculean work today! It really makes people feel better so I guess why it is liked and popular. With more terse languages (usually some form of fp or apl or forth or a mix) you can easily end up after a day with an empty screen with a blinking prompt; you might have done a lot in your head and on paper but you have no proof for your boss and even you yourself feels like a bit of wasted time.

overgard• 7 years ago

I really disagree with this. There's a point on most projects where you've learned about all you're going to learn from it. Maybe it's still growing, but it might not be teaching you anything new. The best way to get good is diversity of experience, and the best way to get diversity of experience is to do a lot of different things. The more diversity you can pack into a smaller time space (without just cramming and rushing things), the faster you'll get good.

If you've only been programming 3 years, you're definitely going to make a lot of mistakes. That's good! That means you're pushing your boundaries and learning. Peer review feedback isn't a mark of shame; and being attached to your code is a _bad_ thing. At the end of the day, coders vastly overvalue code beauty and aesthetics, and overestimate how long their code is really going to live. (I've been a professional for about 11 years, and while I take pride in my work, a lot of the companies I worked for either folded, pivoted to a new product, replaced some of the things I wrote with open source solutions after the problem space had become less novel and a proprietary solution didn't make sense anymore, or a billion other reasons why the code didn't need to live anymore. I'm not saying that's an excuse to write shabby code, but a lot of times "it works and it solves the problem at hand and the code isn't a disaster" is when you should stop working on it).

I think coding is a lot more like creative writing than it is like engineering, and if you want to get good at creative writing you make a point of writing a lot of stories, even though a lot of them won't be good. Or if you're composing music, you write a lot of music, you don't focus on one piece forever. Anything where you make, the more you make, the quicker you get better at it.

sinuhe692• 7 years ago

I think one word would shed light on such anecdotes: deliberate practice. Countless literature and researches have pointed out that simply doing more would not bring much improvement but find out what is missing and practice it to perfection then move to another weaknesses is the best way to achieve top performance, be it in sport, in music or other fields. Like someone who want to learn chess; simply plays a lot each and every day will improve his ELO slowly but it will stall after a while (say at the level of a club player) and he can almost certainly never attain the mastery. In opposite, someone who seeks guidance, study and practice to fix his weaknesses and perfect his technique will improve vastly more in the same amount of time. Effective practice and coaching is also the only difference between merely very good players and grand masters. I can’t imagine why it should be different in the field of programming and software engineering. Someone who writes thousands sloppy games might have learned how to do them faster (and maybe better) but he still learned nothing more about complex systems or secure systems. Only with intense study and practice he can master such stuffs effectively.

The Talent Code of Coyle is a good book to start reading about deliberate practice.

tekkk2• 7 years ago

Yes, exactly this. If you never really think about your coding seriously, and ponder where you should get better at and then do it - you'll never improve! Simply by acknowledging your own mistakes and how you could fix them in the future, let's you build up skill much better than just churning out code day in day out without giving it a second thought.

I've seen the both extremes, the programmers who are so serious about the style of the code that nothing really satisfies them (and consequently progress happens at snail's pace). Then I've seen those, who'll write the ugliest of hacks just to get the thing working and move on. I think there's a deliberate balance between the two, where you feel you're not wasting time on useless things but actually get something done, which you can then comfortably show to your peers without beginning to blush.

And only way of getting there is practise and being mindful of what you are doing. Similar to sports, music - whatever. To know where and how you did wrong is key, often you'll need a very good teacher to show you that. Criticizing yourself works too, but often you either become too strict to yourself or too lenient.

Just starting to code without worrying if this is the "best practise" or not will allow you get into a flow which is much better than over-thinking your approach. Because once you start to do it, like a good warm-up it allows you to see the problem much clearer as you become aware of the problems as you encounter them. Then if you have time, you might want to refactor your solution or just move on the next most important thing. Sometimes it's better to just write awful code to get to that MVP or other important milestone, only after which you start to review your code. Experience will tell you, when is the right time to move fast and when it's good to slow down and enforce a particular paradigm to your codebase.

From purely

tekkk2• 7 years ago

otras• 7 years ago

On that note, what do you think deliberate practice looks like for programming and software engineering?

lifeisstillgood3• 7 years ago

Please stop thinking there are 10x programmers - or perhaps stop thinking it means 10x better.

It is simply 10x more valuable. And that depends on the organisation you work for, the state of the code base and so on.

Look at it this way - sports stars are regularly 10x, 100x more valuable to their team management than A.N.Other professional player. Take football (soccer) - Ronaldo is a waaaay better player than I am easily 100x, but take the newest signing in league 3 or whatever it is - can Ronaldo run 10x as much, is he 10x as likely to put in a penalty or a free kick? No. it's probably not even a question of twice as likely - it's percentages better.

It's just that those percentages matter when the cup is on the line. I am sure that Baseball statistics probably show this - the spread from top of the league to bottom is unlikely to be 10x more runs scored

So more and more it's worth remembering that the value provided to an organisation (and remember that's what you can charge for) is based not on your intrinsic qualities but what you can do for them in their current state.

skrebbel2• 7 years ago

Small percentages matter when the game is competitive. Programming is not competitive.

I agree with your argument but I think your analogy is bad.

taeric• 7 years ago

Such is the life of analogies.

ralusek• 7 years ago

How on earth is programming not competitive? Coming up with the wrong data model can result in millions of dollars in technical debt, a failure to fully realize a product, or certainly allow a competitor to win out. Bad programmers can structure a product so poorly that it is simply unpleasant to work on, and you won't be able to hire or retain engineers.

I think moreso than most careers, a single software engineer is capable of a tremendous amount of good or harm.

lifeisstillgood3• 7 years ago

The field for programming jobs is at least highly competitive- and the OSS field is very winner takes all.

Bad analogies suggest different mental models being discussed - what would you suggest is a better analogy - I would be interested in your mental model.

muzani5• 7 years ago

Actually, this might exactly be why the industry pays so well.

Facebook's biggest threat is not dying on its own, but the possibility of future programmers disrupting it. They're fine with paying billions for companies like Instagram and WhatsApp, because of the possibility that these companies would target the same market and hurt their profit margins. They pay very high amounts to poach employees from other large companies as well.

MRD852• 7 years ago

Is Ronaldo 10x as likely to get a hat-trick to send his team forward in Champions League when they needed 3-0 to progress? He's not running 10x as far but he is so much better due to little things, such as being in the right spot at the right time.

Compare this to programming. A programmer who makes good decisions early on the project will likely save his company a lot of money down the line. A few poor decisions here will cost them a lot of money.

robaato• 7 years ago

Yes! Though Ronaldo is also known for how hard he trains - he is not relying just on his (massive) talent.

Experience gives you exposure to other solutions and can give insights and alternative ways of approaching stuff which as you say can make a huge difference. Sometimes you do just have to grind things out though.

FrankyHollywood3• 7 years ago

"Please stop thinking there are 10x programmers"

I don't really agree, since I consider myself a 10x engineer.

I have countless of examples of guys struggling for 2 months on some project. They get stuck, ask for help and I look at it and build it from scratch in a week.

It's not I'm typing faster, it's more about choosing the right architecture and libraries. You can save insane amounts of time by making the right descisions.

Besides the overall architecture descisions there are a lot of small day to day choices to make. If this value is not valid, do I throw an exception, or silently log something?

In both the small and big design descisions there is always a tradeof. Talent and (years of) experience makes that these descisions come from intuition, which can make you a 10x developer.

onion2k• 7 years ago

I have countless of examples of guys struggling for 2 months on some project. They get stuck, ask for help and I look at it and build it from scratch in a week.

Have you ever wondered why the engineers don't come and ask your advice before they waste a couple of months?

I'd much rather be known as an approachable and helpful engineer who juniors can ask for advice, even if it means I'll never be known as a 10X engineer.

flukus2• 7 years ago

I have countless of examples of guys struggling for 2 months on some project. They get stuck, ask for help and I look at it and build it from scratch in a week.

Are you a 10x engineer or are they 0.1x engineers and how do you differentiate the two?

youareverywrong• 7 years ago

I feel that you do not understand the 10x concept.

Here is a Steve Jobs interview that hopefully will explain it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09JGcDDLBCw

muzani5• 7 years ago

To an extent, it really isn't hard to be a 10x programmer.

Take, for example, the median level 1x programmer. Perhaps a Java programmer working at a large tech corporation on a team of 1000+ in Indonesia or Brazil.

That guy isn't visiting HN. That guy doesn't read tech articles at home. He may join a few programmer groups on Reddit or Facebook. But his main concern is that he gets paid and feeds his family. He doesn't care so much about doing his work well, but he cares that he does it well enough to make a 10% salary raise each year.

He can probably reverse a linked list. But his searches are all O(n^2), and he can't do any less. The company that hires him doesn't really care - they're unfamiliar that things can be better, and as far as they know, they'd rather get hire ten $15k guys than a single $150k star programmer.

Is it possible to code 3x faster than that guy? Certainly. Especially when it comes to harder parts of the work.

Is it possible to code 3x better? As in code that's more efficient and doesn't crash as much? Also very likely.

And someone who codes 3x faster also reduces the cost of the project drastically - you can pay a team one month wages instead of three.

Now you put these multipliers together, you get easily more than 10x, quantifiably.

Sports players may try to run 100m a second faster, but star programmers can easily build a project faster and cheaper.

arethuza3• 7 years ago

I suspect a considerable advantage is knowing that there are bound to be existing things to reverse a list and not writing it yourself.

owenversteeg• 7 years ago

I was going to comment on $15k being pretty far off, but apparently for a mediocre programmer in Brazil it's not that uncommon. Decent ones, though, can get far better salaries from what I've found. I've always thought of starting an outsourcing agency hiring programmers from underpaid countries, but the reality is that the good ones aren't as underpaid as you'd think, and the whole process is incredibly complicated, even if you have substantial ties+citizenship+connections in both the US and the country you're outsourcing to.

Also, if he gets a 10% raise every year, he'll be making 73x as much (21x as much with 3% inflation) at the end of a 45 year career. If he starts out at $15k, he'll end up at $1.1MM/year, $315k in 2019 dollars assuming a hefty 3% inflation. Not half bad for someone who doesn't care about doing his work well and can't google a sorting algorithm!

a_imho• 7 years ago

There are all kinds of programmers, even 0x and negative contribution ones.

wchildhn• 7 years ago

This is why there are so many vulnerable products in the market and engineers are tired of fixing them. People do not think before they start and they are confident enough to say that they have learned from their faults when they are actually too tired to complete the fixing process.

derpherpsson• 7 years ago

I spent my first 4 years after the university at a company with very little quality control. We had to talk the bosses into having code reviews. When we began having code reviews my older colleagues never complained about anything - everything went through.

That truly was quantity over quality. Oftentimes I had to wade through piece-of-shit code that really made my soul hurt. Really. Bad.

But in hindsight that was good. It's good to have spent 4 years ONLY writing code 8 hours straight 5 days a week.

But I never, ever, want to go back to anything like that.

photonios2• 7 years ago

This mirrors my experience. I spend the first two years of my career working somewhere where pretty much everything went through.

There were some projects in the company lead by developers that were some of the best I ever worked with. They upheld very high standards and the code was some of the best I've seen. Most projects were a total mess and nobody asked questions or reviewed code.

I worked on both type of projects. I think it really helped me. Some projects I just wrote code hours and hours on end without little regard to quality, but later on other projects within the company I was exposed to people and code that was significantly better.

jondubois• 7 years ago

I've been coding intensively for more than half of my life from a young age - I'm approaching 16 years of experience now. Also, I've been doing it quite intensively (I was writing games when I was still in school before studying software engineering at university, then I worked for 14 different companies; some startups and some corporations in about 10 different industries. I've completed projects in at least 7 different programming languages). Also I've always been working on a side project during nights and weekends; mostly open source.

I have mixed feelings about the ceramics anecdote because I've met some people who have been coding a long time and producing large quanities of code but it's not good quality. To write high quality code, you need to enjoy the process and be adaptable. You need to have been exposed to a lot of different kinds of projects and management cultures.

Also, the most frustrating thing is that other people who are not good coders don't recognize straight away who is a good coder. Often, it takes a whole year to prove yourself. However, good coders usually know straight away who a good coder is.

Because of this effect, our industry is currently in a bad state. Many of the big popular tech stacks are mediocre compared to some of the alternatives that are available. There is a lot of misinformation and misplaced hype.

Most people who have the power to make hiring decisions are not sufficiently good at coding to be making those decisions. So good coders tend to find themselves smothered in most work environments...

passivepinetree• 7 years ago

Can you elaborate on your opinions about frameworks? What are some tech stacks that are mediocre, and why are they mediocre? What makes an alternative better?

topmonk• 7 years ago

I'm surprised the author didn't mention learning about programming. Programming did come out of the field of computer science, after all.

Not that I think one should never do any hands on practice, but if you spend a large chunk of time learning the concepts of different mathematical fields related to programming, as well as the teaching of other programmers, you'll become a much better programmer than you ever could otherwise.

tdsamardzhiev• 7 years ago

Interesting. I've "evolved" in exactly the opposite way. I used to go for quality all the time. Nowadays I'm pretty confident getting things done swiftly (and thus enabling more code/design iterations) works better for me in both the short and the long term.

That being said, I definitely don't pretend to be the Thomas Mann of software engineering.

lazyjones6• 7 years ago

People who want to write "beautiful code" are not role models, don't listen to them. They are vain and not productive. Listen to the people who finish correct programs on time, or mostly working prototypes in hours or days.

How to recognise the former group: they obsess about coding and other standards and processes, plan and discuss too long how to implement something (plan what to implement, do it, then improve it when it's done; inspiration comes from working on something, not from thinking about it) and never even meet their own estimates for how long it'll take them to deliver. They will tell you they are taking so long because they haven't decided yet how to best implement something, but they don't even have a straightforward implementation (there's always one). If they were truly concerned with "the best way", they'd have several solutions implemented already, together with metrics and benchmarks. They haven't, because they're vain impostors and not capable programmers.

rvanmil• 7 years ago

I think it’s a balance. At the other end of the spectrum are the “cowboys” who are productive by writing sloppy code with bad architecture and are either oblivious of or just ignore the huge pile of technical debt they pass along to the people who get to maintain their code.

varjag• 7 years ago

Take a "perfectionist", and you end up having all that atop of nothing actually yet running in production.

lazyjones6• 7 years ago

Technical debt within a working codebase is a much, much better problem to have than not being able to launch or even demonstrate your product. It's really overrated. I left a huge pile of it in my previous company (amassed over 18 years of programming in Perl) and guess what: it's doing great, more profitable than ever before. The code has been slowly enhanced, some of it refactored. Code quality (as in "beauty", not correctness) is the least of your problems in a startup, although it will look bigger for those who have to work on it (pity them but don't overemphasize).

scarejunba• 7 years ago

It actually doesn't matter because you can always rewrite a working product. If you never have a product nothing helps.

In the end, all code is debt. The only thing is whether you earned anything from the debt. If you never earn anything it doesn't matter that you didn't take on that much debt.

soup10• 7 years ago

In my 20 years of programming i've never heard of a well architectured codebase that is cleanly written, problem free, future proof and a joy to maintain.

konamicode• 7 years ago

At the other end of the spectrum are the “cowboys” who are productive by writing sloppy code with bad architecture and are either oblivious of or just ignore the huge pile of technical debt they pass along to the people who get to maintain their code.

Ousterhout uses the term "tactical tornado"s, which I quite like (source: https://twitter.com/johofer/status/1035442341199446017 apologies I don't have a better source handy).

mpartel• 7 years ago

Moreover, I think there's an 80/20-ish sweet spot. With an attitude of moderation, you can keep a brisk pace and achieve a pretty clean codebase with little extra effort.

It seems best to defer architecting just long enough to see that some component is becoming problematic, but not much longer. Do it too early and you waste effort. Do it too late and you have a much larger mess to clean up.

franciscop2• 7 years ago

This, 1000x times. Experience throwing code does a lot in my experience (~7 years programming, 4 professionally). Learn the best practices, and know when they break. Heck, purposely break them and see if/when/how they bite you back!

A very good rule of thumb to recognize the former group is to simply ask "when is this best practice not valid"? This will tell me whether they are consciously proposing it or mindlessly adding complexity. For every single "best practice" I can find you a case where it's not valid, and if you cannot then there's something very wrong.

hhs6• 7 years ago

Interesting view. In your experience, how did you learn about the best practices - and, then, consider asking when that practice is not valid?

It looks like you add purposeful breaks, experiment, and then see what happens. I wonder if you also talk with your colleagues, self-reflect, think about the big picture rather than just the task at hand when you're doing this?

arethuza3• 7 years ago

"inspiration comes from working on something, not from thinking about it"

Not sure about that - the applications I'm most proud of actually came from extended periods where I was involved in maintaining an existing system, carefully thinking about how it could be improved, so when a chance came I could propose a new application with a well defined list of benefits. Note that by "extended period" I mean a couple of years!

donquichotte• 7 years ago

What I really admire is people who manage to do all of it: start projects, finish them, and produce beautiful code that is simple to reason about.

Whenever I feel bad, sad or just in need on some enlightenment, I go to https://github.com/fogleman and browse Michael's repos.

klichtman• 7 years ago

I agree with most of this, but it is more a matter of talking about programming or being an architecture astronaut.

You can still write beautiful code and be productive. OpenBSD contains some examples.

Of course, as you say one should not talk about writing beautiful code. Just do it.

lazyjones6• 7 years ago

You can still write beautiful code and be productive. OpenBSD contains some examples.

Yes, by all means - if you can, do it. But please try to become as productive as John Carmack first before you aspire to write similarly beautiful code.

momania• 7 years ago

Adding to that: written code has no value, only running code has. The quality of what running code is, or needs to be, depends on the stage of your product and who will be responsible for keeping the code running (either the developer himself or an ops team for instance).

black-alert• 7 years ago

People who want to write "beautiful code" are not role models, don't listen to them. They are vain and not productive.

Your thoughts seem to be very subjective. I hope you don't write your code as naive as you wrote this comment.

I code for over 30 years now. It has always been my desire to write beautiful code that reads well, scales well, has no bugs and performs good. Does this makes me a vain imposter and not capable? At this very moment I am working on a total rewrite of an unmanageable codebase that was written by a very 'productive' guy.

Udo• 7 years ago

Any paradigm can be formalized to the point of perversion. I think that's what the OP meant when they said that the hallmark of that group is how they obsess about standards and processes. The existence of cowboy-style code such as the project you're currently dealing with does not necessarily mean that the "process-over-results" people are in the right. There are many factors to consider, including the structure of the organization you're writing the code for. I don't think it's naive advice to suggest that people spend less time listening to vain role models, instead of actively working on their own skills in order to make better judgements in the future, which brings us back to the point put forward in the article: the way to mastery is through practice.

rzwitserloot• 7 years ago

I think you and the person you're replying to are closer in opinion about what it means to write good, professional code, then your comments are letting on.

How I take the article, and what I think most in this entire comment thread agree with, are the following principles:

[1] code quality IS important. I define 'code quality' here as how many bugs are introduced to do a given feature, how resilient this code base is to requests for additional features/changes, and how easy it is for new hires to grok it / for you to grok it after a few months have passed working on something else and you've lost familiarity.

[2] Whilst it is important, it is not the only concern. In fact, a shipping product is MORE important. That's not to say that code quality isn't important. Any project that has deplorable code quality even if it ships is in trouble.

[3] So far the most effective strategy for producing code with high quality, is experience (that's subjective; my opinion. But I bet you share it). The best way to get experience is to write lots of code. In fact, writing code of LOW code quality should help MORE: The 8th feature request that comes in that initially sounds like a job of a few hours that turns into a weeklong exercise in frustration with stapled onto the end of that process another week or two chasing bugs - and maybe you learn something about where you went wrong in your code that powered the initial shipping product. This sounds like a much better way to learn these lessons than reading a bunch of blogs and listening to a bunch of presentations theorising about what 'beautiful code' means.

[4] extremes are bad. This more or less is already concluded by #1-#3, though. However, the 'beauty' extremists tend to present, blog, and in general act like they hold all the answers, more than the cowboy extremists do. That's entirely subjective opinion, of course. It's just my experience, and yours may well be different. But _IF_ it is indeed true that you're far more likely to run into a beauty extremist than a cowboy extremist, then it stands to reason programmers who are irritated by extremists of any colour will tend to exaggerate somewhat more on the _other side_ of the beauty extremists.

In the end it's a pendulum, isn't it? A presentation or blog post that comes across as authored by a beauty extremist probably was a capable, 'well adjusted' (in the sense that they would agree that shipping code is at least as important, and experience is very important) – but decided to exaggerate a tad on the beauty side to address some perceived notion that the audience's balance was too far towards the cowboy end of the spectrum.

Enough of those kinds of presentations, and a few are bound to perceive that the pendulum has now swung too far out towards the beauty end, and start exaggerating the value of the cowboy end.

extra_rice2• 7 years ago

Just as bad as the people who obsess over "beautiful code" and whatnot are the people who straight out reject the idea, then label those who observe them the "enemy" of this industry.

I think the key here really is mindfulness. Developers read code significantly more than they write them, and one of the primary goals of best practices and clean coding guidelines is to help teams communicate effectively through code. Writing code well is a skill, but that doesn't start and end at taking all the "rules" to heart; that's just the first step. The next is really to recognise that there aren't any rules, but more heuristics based on collective experiences. Software development is not an exact science, and just like the Agile Manifesto, clean coding guidelines only provide framework upon which to build any team's practices: a starting point from which to find what actually works for their project.

remeq4• 7 years ago

I dislike this way of thinking. Programmer shouldn't be described like:

ability_to_beautiful_code ---V------------ ability_to_deliver

Programmer should be described more like:

ability_to_beautiful_code: 0%---V-----------100%

ability_to_deliver: 0%----------V----100%

And both metrics should have certain threshold for you.

smadurange• 7 years ago

Write beautiful code, build productive and correct software, live long and prosper :V

lm284692• 7 years ago

People who want to write "beautiful code" are not role models, don't listen to them. They are vain and not productive.

People who push "mostly working" code are hell on earth. Sure you spend 5 hours less on it right now, but it's going to cost literal days or weeks down the line.

How many times have I seen developers push some "good enough" code that they didn't discuss with anyone because it looks good to have XXX commits for their quarterly feedback. They knew "what" to implement but not "how" to implement it or even "why" implement it in the first place, which ends up in hours of useless discussions that would have been avoided by a 1hr meeting before starting coding. How many times have I seen people going for a DB, stick with it for years because "that's what google/facebook/whatever uses" and end up having to migrate everything to another DB because they went to fast and didn't spend 1/10th of the time on analysing their needs and writing specs.

Do you spend 10 years designing a plane and then 6 months actually building it, or do you spend 6 month planning it and 10 years fixing broken, hacky, "mostly working" parts ? What works for school or hobby projects doesn't work in most professional environments, especially nowadays when developers stays 1-3 years in a company and move to the next job leaving a pile of unmaintainable "mostly working" code.

Coding is the last stage of the process, it's the easy part, a monkey could implement the code if the specs and processes are solid.

People who want to deliver at all cost are not role models, don't listen to them. They are vain and not productive. They might be capable coders but they're not capable engineers for sure.

“Programs are meant to be read by humans and only incidentally for computers to execute.” ― Donald Knuth

lazyjones6• 7 years ago

People who push "mostly working" code are hell on earth. Sure you spend 5 hours less on it right now, but it's going to cost literal days or weeks down the line.

Wildly exaggerated, but I'll bite: it's still better to save 5 hours while you are bleeding money (before your product works) and spend 1 week to improve the "beauty" of your code while it's already paying your salary.

“Programs are meant to be read by humans and only incidentally for computers to execute.” ― Donald Knuth

That's a fine attitude for someone who wants to teach CS or explore programming as a hobby. For professionals, programs need to execute correctly and go into production ASAP. Emotional and mental cost to the programmer is of less importance.

fluffycat• 7 years ago

I have seen way more damage done by the people "mostly working prototypes in hours or days" than people who want to write beautiful code. I understand that fixation to produce something beautiful can lead to paralysis but this is rarely the case. In most cases the prototype grows cancerously and it becomes impossible to fix in quite short time, my advice, listen to the experienced programmers who screwed up more time than you before, even if they seem to be obsessed with "beautiful code".

cousin_it• 7 years ago

Most of the damage I've seen was from people who think they can write beautiful code, but instead write a slow overengineered framework and use clout to force everyone else's code into that framework. Sadly, these people are often smart and experienced. It's more of an attitude problem: they are not content with making a library that will sit at the bottom of the call stack, when they could instead make a framework that sits at the top.

lazyjones6• 7 years ago

I have seen way more damage done by the people "mostly working prototypes in hours or days" than people who want to write beautiful code

Because people who write "beautiful code" don't often achieve anything that can be seen. Successful companies are based on quickly written code that delivers.

remeq4• 7 years ago

I despise this kind of mentality which tries to demonize someone's passion to actually write a beautiful code. This kind of mentality takes away "the human factor" from the working environments turning IT jobs into delivery driven factories. I for one need to enjoy my work to actually be productive. And don't get me wrong - I understand that product people need to deliver products and they enjoy doing their diagrams and presentations but I am an engineer, and I like myself and my life and as a result I just want to do and be surrounded by beautiful things so I honestly don't give a shit if some product will not be delivered on time because product managers did include only business requirements and ignored requirement of my engineering team that we need to be able to sign our name under the code we write and be surrounded be beautiful things in our work life. Sorry, but engineers are part of the team, part of the product, if you ignored that at the beginning, it is not our fault.

Also, ability to write beautiful code implies the ability to deliver code much more then vice versa because there is a good chance that someone who actually is capable of writing beautiful code had to get to that level by actually also delivering stuff to production in the past.

So yes, in my world, someone who writes a beautiful code (meaning - correct, performant, maintainable, understandable, clever and so on) is a pretty good candidate to be a role model.

Ntrails2• 7 years ago

meaning - correct, performant, maintainable, understandable, clever and so on

My favourite part of this is how often these criteria are essentially at odds.

    - Understandable *and* performant?  
    - Clever *and* maintainable?

But, you know, I'm also bad at all this so maybe it's just me :p

scriptkiddy• 7 years ago

meaning - correct, performant, maintainable, understandable, clever and so on

The only little nit-pick I have here is the use of the word "clever". Maybe you and I define clever differently in a software engineering context, but to me, "clever" is a dirty word in programming.

For me, "clever" means undefined behavior, one-off hack, difficult to parse, shortcut, etc. The difference between "clever" code and "bad" code is that "clever" code is written by someone with a lot of knowledge and experience. Their knowledge and experience has allowed them to work with the undefined/undocumented behavior of languages, libs, etc in order to come up with a solution that has the least lines of code/uses the least memory, etc. Not to say that those things are unworthy metrics, but "clever" code doesn't seem to consider maintainability or stability.

I think a better descriptor to strive for is "elegant", defined in my opinion by code that is beautiful in it's own simplicity, succinctness, reliability, and correctness.

purple_ducks• 7 years ago

Listen to the people who finish correct programs on time, or mostly working prototypes in hours or days.

Generally done by people who don't think through the requirements or know why they're doing what they're doing.

"I just copied pasted the example and hacked it until it did what i wanted. I'm still not sure why it works lol"

Completely fucking over the next person who has to work that code.

peteradio2• 7 years ago

It's the American way! Leave a steaming pile of shit behind and laugh at the next idiot for stepping in it.

satokema• 7 years ago

It would be much easier if the next person were the creator of the code, but instead we have this machine cog mindset of "we can just throw any of our developers at any given problem whenever".

snidane• 7 years ago

Also known as the difference between doing things right (beautiful code) vs doing the right thing (working software).

I like ideas from the systems thinkers like Russell Ackoff about this.

Ackoff expands by suggesting that doing things right is about efficiency but doing the right thing is about effectiveness. He makes a strong case for the connection between wisdom and doing/identifying the right things. He notes further that when we try to do things right about the wrong thing, we actually make things worse. Such attempts at improvement actually take us further from both the recognition and accomplishment of the “right thing”.

https://ackoffcenter.blogs.com/ackoff_center_weblog/2018/04/...

swat535• 7 years ago

The issue here isn't beautiful code vs quick code.

I think it's between spending some time and thinking about the problem you are trying to solve vs brute forcing a quick prototype to get it done.

I think your code will look beautiful by itself if the engineer fully understands the problem at hand.

This process takes time and practice. I personally throw away my quick first solution and let the fog clear first.

Somethings that have generally given me good results: drawing stuff, taking small breaks, listening to my tests (if my tests hurt, it means my design is bad)

Would love to hear other thoughts on this !

stronglikedan• 7 years ago

I've "finish[ed] more correct programs on time" by planning all of the details in a Design Document before writing a line of code, than I ever have by planning at a high level only before implementing, but that's just my personal anecdote. Although, I do take the MVP-then-iterate approach if I don't have a tight deadline, because the early feedback loop can be invaluable in that type of development process.

norswap• 7 years ago

Like everything, it depends.

I think you're right for some classes of problems.

For others, going slow and painstakingly seeking to simplify is the only way. Otherwise the complexity will eat you alive and the whole edifice will collapse on itself.

tinus_hn• 7 years ago

War is peace.

Freedom is slavery.

Worse is better.

rejschaap• 7 years ago

“Refactoring code” would be something left to the apprentice, not something that I, the master who has churned out enough ceramic pots, would be bothered with.

The master potter does not churn out pots that need to be fixed. He focuses on quantity to get to quality faster, that is the whole point of that story in my opinion.

Also, "refactoring code" should not be seen as such a separate activity that it can (or should) be done by other people.

thanhhaimai• 7 years ago

I think we’re conflating learning and producing when we discuss quantity and quality. During learning time, quantity is what you want to focus on. During work mode, you want to slow down and think carefully. Only when you are very sure about the selected solution that you start going quickly. Applying the story of James Joyce in a broad stroke might be misguided.

If I have to pick, I’d err on the side of doing more than trying to slow down and write perfect code. When you’re junior, your definition of “perfect” code might be very different from others’. You might be reinforcing bad habits rather than learning. I’ve seen junior SWEs insist on spending hours eliminating a couple lines of duplicated code by pulling them out into functions to achieve their perfect code. At the same time, they neglect basic coding hygiene, put defensive nullptr checks everywhere, and not design for readability and testing.

ensiferum• 7 years ago

For learning, produce as much as possible. For production, produce as little as possible.

muzani5• 7 years ago

I've been facing this in the past year after I started doubling my consulting rates. A part of me wanted to do 2x better work as well, and that just ended up in getting less work and lower quality work done.

Taking my sweet time is definitely not productive either.

I find the balance is to treat it like sketching. Instead of trying to "print" out code, well designed from scratch, from top to bottom. It's better to sketch out the main "lines" of it. It involves a lot of erasing past lines and old code, or even making redundant code at times. You definitely need a lot of scaffolding and placeholders, especially early on.

alexgmcm• 7 years ago

The author has another blog post about learning to play the violin and how it taught him the importance of deliberate practice which I feel is probably what he is also trying to get across in this post.

I am experiencing something similar as I continue to study the classical guitar.

I agree that the importance of deliberate practice over just coding and coding really does matter - in my day job I will write many lines of code doing the same string processing etc. (I work in Data Science) but when I am trying to learn I really want to think if I am doing it in a Pythonic way, how I might make the code more reusable and so on.

averros2• 7 years ago

It's very easy: most coders are undisciplined hackers, not engineers. Unfortunately the prevalent macho coder culture (agile, and the rest of that crap along the lines of "move fast break things") positively encourages hacking away without much planning, design, or forethought.

Real engineers spend most of their time learning, thinking, designing, and planning. Coding for them is mostly exercise for fingers, something which needs to be done but ultimately providing no challenge. They learned not only from textbooks but also from their own mistakes, and know what to watch for and where to double-check themselves.

The outcomes are strikingly different: code produced by real engineers usually simply works. No need to babysit it in production. It also solves the real problem rather than "improving" on something which was adequate in the first place (face it: most new software replacing the older one is worse - more bloat, more bugs, harder to use). The real engineer understands that complexity is THE enemy, and breeding (or dragging in) unnecessary complexity is a hallmark of a freaking amateur.

Oh, and academia doesn't teach engineering. Your C.S. degree means shit. Old codgers who remember punching cards and incantations like //GO.SYSIN DD * may be tired of learning the shiny new toys and aren't up to the speed on the latest jargon, but over the years of wrangling code they acquired wisdom, and you'd be very well advised to listen to them.

bitblit87• 7 years ago

I think labelling a development methodology and macho or not engineering is disingenuous. Any methodology practiced without an engineering mindset looks like that. Agile methodologies practiced by engineers looks like good engineering.

averros2• 7 years ago

Methodology shmethodology. No management fad can replace thinking. Boeing 737 MAX is what you get when scrum masters get to boss around engineers.

radosc• 7 years ago

I do not believe the ceramics story. It is either nice fake to prove the point or what that particular teacher valued was a natural expression rather than perfection. Applying that principle to photography would mean that every one of us is now an artist because we made 1000s of vacation photos and photographers that used just film cameras are bound to produce lower quality work. I've also seen many startups that generated a lot of low-quality code that became a tech debt super fast, and all it needed is someone stopping the line and rethinking the whole thing.

Dowwie• 7 years ago

One prolific programmer who comes to mind from this article is Nikolay Kim, author of the Actix projects in Rust, aiohttp in Python, and many other open source projects. The Actix Project has evolved so much over a short period of time. The author learns by doing, with haste.

pojzon• 7 years ago

I think that being a professional is exactly that:

"Being able to balance those two core things to meet client needs."

Any kind of extremisms is bad, no matter where applied.

weeber• 7 years ago

Doing it more can provide better result only when it is allowed to trash the previous iterations to use the latest one.

This is not the case in the industry, we cannot change everything in a product at each iteration. This is why at least a little care and architecture have to be done before doing it and trashing must be made with care.

paxpelus• 7 years ago

I have worked many times on ugly and on beautiful code. What I consider ugly is not always ugly for other developers and the other way around.

edpichler• 7 years ago

This is interesting reading. Continuous Delivery fits perfectly on this idea of continuous building and learning.

kriro• 7 years ago

Write more, care about your craft in general terms. Then it'll get better. It's a skill, skills get better with more practice. Premature optimization is the root of all evil.

werber• 7 years ago

I've had this conversation a million times. I think when you're learning and working on your own to build a skill, do it fast and do it over and over. When you're working on a shared code base, you need to be more cognizant of your actions, of maintaining the established styles and conventions. I've know very few 10x or 100x programmers, and am not one myself. But I have had to deal with people who sacrificed quality for speed and every time a code review for those kind of people comes my way, I know I'm in for a ride that will take me away from the work I need to be doing.

3pt14159• 7 years ago

This article is good, but these conversations here on HN always bug me.

Yes—write a ton of code.[0] Just do it. Make your favourite couple languages extensions of yourself.

Yes—think through your code really clearly. Spend a day on your migration or other data-structure altering changes. They're going to echo throughout your whole application and, ultimately, organization.

[0] The closer you get to the API, the faster you should code. Not the interface definition itself, that should be thought through, but the code that responds to a call to the interface. The serializer, the part of the controller that calls the render, these parts are easy. Just roll them out. The models and migrations are much more important. Spend time there. It's not an all or nothing thing.

jnty• 7 years ago

People used to heavily criticise Minecraft from a technical point of view. Their criticisms were often entirely reasonable - it was at one point a very inefficient and unstable piece of software. However, it's now the second best-selling game of all time. Sometimes it's better to churn out a release and fix the problems later than let quality worries block you from achieving anything.

saint_abroad• 7 years ago

The point as applies to individuals extends to projects also:

Programming system builders have also been exposed to this lesson, but it seems to have not yet been learned. Project after project designs a set of algorithms and then plunges into construction of customer-deliverable software on a schedule that demands delivery of the first thing built.
[...] plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow.

Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month (1975)

ken• 7 years ago

As one of the million people who tried to read Ulysses and failed, I'm not sure I'd hold up Joyce as the example of what programmers should aspire to. There's plenty of popular and even good creative works which were written quickly or even under external time pressure.

pier25• 7 years ago

FYI the ceramics story comes from a book called "Art and Fear" which I highly recommend to any creative individual.

gumby• 7 years ago

This is why programming (as a profession) is engineering and is different computer science (as it is today -- when I was a student 40 years ago it was still turning into a "science"). Engineering as a discipline is at its heart balancing tradeoffs of factors like time, cost, weight, strength, efficiency etc. There is no single pole on any of these axes that can dominate, even though for illustrative purposes it's generally useful to do so when writing an essay.

(Also three years is a really short time, though the author seems to be using that time well in order to learn and meta-learn).

wayfarer2s• 7 years ago

I'm surprised the author's takeaway from the Joyce quote was disillusionment. He's actually quite close to the secret sauce. I don't think writing more code and ending up with less code are at odds. In fact, I think you need to write more code to end up with less. You write more code in order to understand the problem space. Once you understand the problem space, you can then refactor everything that you wrote into more concise code that more accurately reflects the problem.

James Joyce wrote Ulysses at the rate of a hundred words per day if you only consider the finished product. However, I doubt every word that Joyce wrote ended up in Ulysses. I'm sure he did quite a lot of cutting and rewriting.

The takeaway from me from the two quoted stories was that quality and quantity are not at odds, but instead are the yin and yang of productivity. They reinforce each other. The more things you produce, the more patterns you are exposed to which in turn leads to higher quality since experience leads to efficiency, giving you more time to get things right.

WangYekun2• 7 years ago

I think second is good

WangYekun2• 7 years ago

I think to second is good.

Programming: Doing it more vs. doing it better

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