Mastering Programming (2016)

https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/mastering-programming

by BerislavLopac • 2 years ago

284 66 2 years ago

tidyfirst.substack.com

FrustratedMonky2• 2 years ago

I think an expert knows this.

and

For A new, non-expert, these suggestions might be too generic, too high level, broad. They wont grasp the point.

wildknocker• 2 years ago

Even if the suggestions are a bit too generic, they might click for someone some time after they've read it. It also helps validate some things that less experienced programmers might be doing but aren't sure are the best things. I for example found that some things I seem to be gravitating towards are mentioned, which will hopefully allow me to focus on them and grasp them better in the future.

FrustratedMonky2• 2 years ago

I agree.

I might be, being miss-interpreted as dismissing this article.

They are definitely good points, and doesn't hurt to read them.

I think all the points are valid.

Maybe I was just contemplating how experts sometimes 'summarize' their knowledge, condense it, but in the process of trying to be succinct, becomes itself un-fathomable, generic.

phforms• 2 years ago

Many of these suggestions made me remember my own experiences, some where I intuitively followed them and some where I did not. Reading this write-up made me realize their value and will hopefully remind me that I need to do these things more often.

As someone who is not an expert but tries to gain wisdom from past experiences, it helps me to see where my intuitions might have been right or wrong, even if I may not get the point right away.

ta2112• 2 years ago

Looks right. Read it and transcend journeyman programmers!

hnben• 2 years ago

I am always amazed at how some people can put very complex concepts into very simple words. It's an art that is often undervalued.

ioblomov• 2 years ago

To switch contexts for a moment, let me suggest the French epigrammatist who influenced Nietzsche…

https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/knowledge-of-men/th...

andxor_• 2 years ago

You can too!

randomdata10• 2 years ago

On the other hand, I'm not sure he succeeded on that front when communicating Agile or TDD. Arguably there are no works misconstrued more in the realm of computing than those. It may just be luck in this case – or perhaps a skill that has been honed over the years?

GMoromisato2• 2 years ago

I was ready to crap all over this--I've seen so many of these kind of posts--but this was (IMHO) quite good. There's a ton of (as the kids say) alpha in each of the bullet points.

I can't say that I practice all or most of these habits, but the points about "calling your shots" and "concrete hypotheses" resonate. For example, when I add a debugging printf/log, I always ask myself, "will this output invalidate one or more hypotheses?" If not, then I need to rethink the problem.

pavel_lishin• 2 years ago

There's a ton of (as the kids say) alpha in each of the bullet points.

Come on, I know I'm about to hit 40, but slang can't be evolving that fast! How am I supposed to be keeping up with all the kids?

GMoromisato2• 2 years ago

Don't ask me! I don't have enough rizz to get included in those circles.

melagonster• 2 years ago

maybe tiktok is a resolution.

cybrox• 2 years ago

Agreed, these are surprisingly on point.

The flow of 80/15/5 is what true seniority looks like in my opinion.

Do a lot of the heavy lifting on a goal, explore valuable (and sometimes promising but with a stretch) avenues around that goal and then be able to document and articulate in a way that another person can grow into it while you venture forth into the next challenge.

andrei_says_• 2 years ago

Coincidentally these are the things I feel most enjoyable in my job, and I am good at doing them.

I will never accomplish perfection in coding. Much higher satisfaction in discovery and collaboration.

ozim• 2 years ago

I see it is written by Kent Beck - so look him up because he is not your average blogspam wannabe but actually someone you could list as software development master.

Scubabear684• 2 years ago

I generally don’t meta comment, but a bit surprising to me that the bulk of this discussion has been flagged dead. I think the discussion and criticisms there were valid.

jdlshore• 2 years ago

If you have enough karma, you can “vouch” a dead comment back to life by clicking the timestamp.

At the time of these writing, only one comment was dead, and it was rude and content-free. The rest of its tree was arguing about Beck in general rather than the article, so everything’s working as intended IMO.

dsissitka• 2 years ago

If you like this you might like the book:

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/tidy-first/978109815123...

Previous discussion:

How I came to write “Tidy First?” tl;dr it took 18 years

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35246995

Tidy First?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38942400

bsder5• 2 years ago

Your regular reminder that Kent Beck was part of the Extreme Programming brain trust behind the massive failure that was the Chrysler Comprehensive Compensation System: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_Comprehensive_Compens...

Programming advice from him and his cohorts (Ron Jeffries and Martin Fowler) should be regarded with several large grains of salt.

doctor_eval• 2 years ago

I haven’t heard of C3 before, but I’m a big fan of reading about software project failures, and I’m not a fan of every aspect of XP, so I was certainly curious about this.

That said, the Wikipedia page neither supports nor refutes your assertion, and Fowler himself discusses C3’s failure here: https://martinfowler.com/bliki/C3.html

Fowler refers to notes that don’t seem to be in the Wikipedia entry any more: “In particular the entry in Wikipedia is misleading and incomplete, much of its comments seem to be based on a paper from a determined XP critic whose sources are unclear. Certainly its comments on performance are a misleading interpretation of material in my Refactoring book.”

Do you have any other links to this project? The fact that it went live and then reverted to the COBOL version is interesting.

whstl3• 2 years ago

There is some discussion in C2 by the people involved about whether it was a failure or not: http://wiki.c2.com/?HighDisciplineMethodology

I believe the characterization of C3 as a "failure" is because it wasn't able to deliver the goal (goal was paying 87000 people – it only reached about 9000), and was later discontinued for multiple reasons (some unrelated, like people leaving, the merger with Daimler). The claim that "XP was banned" there seems overblown, it seems it's just that "people at DaimlerChrysler stopped taking terms like Smalltalk, OOP and XP" (per link above).

bsder5• 2 years ago

I suspect I have some cached references, but I would have to go dig a presentation out of my backups.

Unfortunately, all parties involved in the C3 project would rather that it be forgotten. As such, it seems that it is going down the memory hole even faster than most Internet things. :(

Scubabear684• 2 years ago

Perhaps the biggest fail of XP and C3 was the YAGNI philosophy.

As it turns out, in many complex domains, you ARE going to need it, so you should factor that into your design sooner rather than later.

This is also why many consulting lead projects fail, because the developers do not understand the complexities of the domain.

Not everything is a CRUD website.

enterprise_cog• 2 years ago

YAGNI is about not implementing features until they are needed. It’s not about ignoring the complexities of the domain. You can adhere to the principle while still designing a system that acknowledges the complexities but defers implementation until it is needed.

matchagaucho2• 2 years ago

YAGNI is a conscious and iterative task prioritization process. From a Pareto perspective, it just means to focus on the 20% of functionality that provides 80% of the value first.

That's not to say the other 80% of requests should be ignored. But instead well documented and groomed in a backlog.

matchagaucho2• 2 years ago

These object-oriented "birth projects" were all pretty much deemed failures. NeXTStep by Steve Jobs, C3...

Yet all these years later, the principles of OOP, and the companies built on them, outlived the politics that tried to squash them in the 90s.

bsder5• 2 years ago

OOP is a failure ... looked at through the lens of today.

Back then, OOP originally solved a very real problem--optimizing memory usage of bunches of objects that have mostly common behavior with just a few tweaks different from one another. It did pretty well at that at the expense of introducing some extraneous coupling and complexity.

And then memory got big and disk became SSD.

Now, programmers would rather burn extra memory, avoid pointer chasing (expensive on modern microprocessors), and ditch the extraneous coupling that introduces unnecessary complexity.

hirvi742• 2 years ago

Thank you so much for sharing this. I finally have some ammo. As a .Net dev, I constantly encounter too many people who think Fowler is a programming prophet.

yura• 2 years ago

Near as I can tell the fundamental problem was that the GoldOwner and GoalDonor weren't the same. The customer feeding stories to the team didn't care about the same things as the managers evaluating the team's performance. This is bad, and we know it's bad, but it was masked early because we happened to have a customer who was precisely aligned with the IT managers. The new customers who came on wanted tweaks to the existing system more than they wanted to turn off the next mainframe payroll system. IT management wanted to turn off the next mainframe payroll system. Game over. Or not, we'll see... -- KentBeck
So, I'm curious - does this represent a failure of XP? -- AnonymousCoward
Sensitivity, certainly. But if the people who tell you what to do don't agree with the people who evaluate what you are doing, you're stuffed, XP or no XP. -- KentBeck

http://wiki.c2.com/?CthreeProjectTerminated

Between this and the Wikipedia article, it's not clear to me that the project failed due to XP practices.

mikaraento• 2 years ago

While C3 might not be strong evidence against XP neither should it be considered evidence _for_ XP.

beryilma• 2 years ago

I was about to post using the same words "grains of salt". Any programming advice from Agile and XP gurus should be basically ignored.

lijok• 2 years ago

I think the article can be summarised as; “Don’t flail around aimlessly”

dre_bot• 2 years ago

Thanks for making me feel dumb. :D

vaylian• 2 years ago

Isolation. If you only need to change a part of an element, extract that part so the whole subelement changes.

I don't get what the author means by this. Anyone wants to elaborate?

ganyu• 2 years ago

Say some gigantic piece of function has 600 lines of code that does logic this, logic that and logic this and that. Suppose one day your PM goes into your office and request that a certain special case be added to this feature.

You do not further increase the complexity of this function by having one or two variables in the front, several if-elses in the middle not to mention a couple gotos.

You take these special cases and the most relevant logic away into yet another function, document it and hence ensure the changes to that 'special logic' do not mess up with the rest of that feature.

Mastering Programming (2016)

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