Hopefully more controversial programming opinions

http://prog21.dadgum.com/149.html

by elssar • 14 years ago

103 98 14 years ago

prog21.dadgum.com

capkutay• 14 years ago

Computer science should only be offered as a minor. You can major in biology, minor in computer science. Major in art, minor in computer science. But you can't get a degree in CS.

The way university is structured, it would be nearly impossible to minor in CS and learn anything low-level or advanced like computer architecture or operating systems. Perhaps you can push out a desirable employee with a practical knowledge of programming, but could you really educate true "software engineers" via a minor?

nightski• 14 years ago

I would actually doubt the usefulness of minors in nearly any subject (holding 2 myself).

webreac• 14 years ago

This opinion about CS minor is not controversial. We are almost unanimous to say it is stupid.

AFAIK, automated pretty formatter is not controversial. I wonder if your opinion about pure functional language is controversial.

Thank you for bringing to light some real controversy. In particular the old one about compiler optimisation. See for reference http://books.google.fr/books?id=6kHs4s-79bkC&pg=PA43&...

mkopinsky4• 14 years ago

I am a bioengineer by degree, software developer by profession. Most valuable skill that I use in the day-to-day is thinking like a programmer, and understanding how to make sense of data in an intelligent way. But ultimately, this is all about solving problems - programming is simply a tool towards this end. Go up to a carpenter (and I mean a well-trained carpenter, the kind who carries more than just the PHP hammer [0]) and ask him which carpentry technique to use, and he'll tell you the right answer in a flash. But ask him whether carpentry is even the right approach for a given problem, and I wish you good luck.

Programming skills are important, but a deep knowledge of the problem domain is sometimes far more critical to being able to actually solve the problem.

[0] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/06/the-php-singularity...

npguy• 14 years ago

"You shouldn't be allowed to write a library for use by other people until you have ten years of programming under your belt. If you think you know better and ignore this rule, then one day you will come to realize the mental suffering that you have inflicted upon others, and you will have to live with that knowledge for the rest of your life."

stunning.

notimetorelax3• 14 years ago

I'm actually currently in process of writing a small library, but I have only 6 years of experience. I'm frightened.

lmm• 14 years ago

Don't be. That idea is bollocks. Experience has approximately zero correlation with ability.

(how's that for controversial?)

Deestan• 14 years ago

Don't be intimidated. The only way to learn is to do.

Just keep in mind that a library takes a surprising amount of time to make "good enough".

The most frequent sin in library design is to knock something up in a weekend, check that it sorta works for you, and then consider it done.

hansbo• 14 years ago

  It's a mistake to introduce new programmers to OOP before they understand the basics 
  of breaking down problems and turning the solutions into code.

Given how well I remember my classmates with little-to-none programming experience struggled with understanding pointers while not being able to write the simplest algorithms, I thought this was a no-brainer. Is it really a controversial opinion?

alexchamberlain4• 14 years ago

I've never understood what's confusing about pointers...

mkopinsky4• 14 years ago

1) Indirection. Pointers require thinking in a few steps. Indirection is hard. It is a vital skill in any kind of programming (or especially debugging), but it does not come naturally to people who've only ever had to deal with the concrete.

2) Early on, you learn that ints and chars and floats and some_structs are fundamentally different data types. Then suddenly you're told that int%s, char%s, float%s, some_struct%s, and even void%s are fundamentally the same. Huh?

3) The fact that C uses % both to create a pointer and to dereference. These are conflicting meanings, and the unrelatedness of those two concepts is not sufficiently explained.

EDIT: Silly HN parser. I now replaced asterisks with %s.

InclinedPlane3• 14 years ago

http://homepages.tcp.co.uk/~nicholson/alice.html

d--b• 14 years ago

It's the abstraction that's difficult to get in the first place. In Basic, a variable represents at the same time the data and its memory address, the two concepts are not separated. When you introduce pointers, you split that concept in two: address and data, and to complicate you say address is some form of data. In Basic, the variables are the memory. Each variable you manipulate is equivalent to a piece of memory you can store things in or get things out. With pointers, you loose that equivalence: memory becomes invisible through the code. I can have a memory block that exists in my memory that is no longer pointed by any variable. This means that you get a separation between the way memory is and the way the code looks like. What is difficult when learning pointers is to get that extra level of abstraction: you have to look at the code as an access route to the memory, not as the memory itself.

beagle3• 14 years ago

> Is it really a controversial opinion?

I haven't heard anyone argue against it, but for a very long time every single curriculum out there started with either Java or C++, and had to talk about object quite early on (you can't print "hello world" in Java without it, and you can't use C++ streams either).

And arguments I've heard about that practice as a proxy for your question, indicate that it is (or at least, was between the late '90s and the late '00s) controversial.

dalke• 14 years ago

You must write a class in order to do "hello world" in Java. C++ streams don't require you to write a class, only use what appears to be a strange syntax. You can go a long way in C++ without defining any classes of your own.

cubicle673• 14 years ago

[update: I've got hold of some of the code. Here's a copy of one of the programmes http://pastie.org/4615158]

I have an awesome story that i think I've told before, but I'll tell it again anyway :)

My father-in-law is a pharmasist. back in the early 90s computers were starting to make their way into Pharmacy and the first few pharmacy sortware packages appeared. this increased with time, as you'd expect. At some point he decided it was inevitible but he decided (I have no idea why, except that he's always been quite independent) he'd write his own software. Took himself off to nightschool and learned dBase III. He'd never written a line of code prior to this.

He then proceeded to write an entire pharmacy suite of software tools that are still in use. They've been heavily updated and added to over the last 20 years but it's still all DBase III running on DOS. It's a saggering amount of code over hundreds of files but it all works. I've seen the code and it wouldn't pass a first semester coding course. each programme is a single 10,000 line spaghetti-fest. I've tried to explain functions/methods to him but he didn't understand and in the end I gave up. apparently he doesn't need them!

I can't understate how complex this software is - it's stock control, point of sale (including the usual things like birthday vouchers, discounts accounts etc etv), prescription dispensing, patient records etc. everything for a modern pharmacy. The australian health dept know about it and it's met all their criteria. it does everything.

It's mindbogglingly awfull bad code by any metric imaginable but yet it's robust, appears to be as-good-as bug free and has been able to be maintained (gov regulations for pharmacy change constantly so it's required major changes each year to keep up to date) and in production use for almost 20 years. oh, and it's fast :)

[Edit: looking at the other comments it seems I've replied to the wrong thing. I was actually writing a comment in response to this http://prog21.dadgum.com/87.html (Write Code Like You Just Learned How to Program) which was linked to from the main article]

schmrz2• 14 years ago

I wonder how much that initial version changed during the 20 years of maintenance.

I find it hard to believe that someone was maintaining it for 20 years without improving the quality (of the code/design) and making it easier to maintain. Have you seen the code base of the initial version or of the version that is currently being used?

notimetorelax3• 14 years ago

To be fair I know of programmers that hack their code until it works and then they forget about it. Next time they need to change something: take the ax and hack away...

cubicle673• 14 years ago

I've know my wife for the last 18 or 19 years and it was written before that, so I haven't seen the original. I have seen him debugging code in the evenings though. This consisted of printing out the entire programme (in the DBase sense a "programme" is a single file, but a programme in our sense would be a collection of dbase programmes) and the paper (dot matrix, so it's all connected) trailing all thruought the house as he draws pencil lines all over it to reconstruct programme flow. no indentation at all

The short answer to your question is no, I didn't see any evidence of improved structure or practices at all. All variables global. goto ftw. no procedures/methods/functions at all. He's never even heard of the concept when I tried to explain.

[Edit: managed to get hold of some of the code (see parent) and it looks like I was wrong on the indentation - he did start to use it at some point]

kamaal4• 14 years ago

You find it hard to believe because you are convinced it can't be done other wise. Once you see some one doing it you will believe otherwise.

kamaal4• 14 years ago

This reminds me of a manager of mine who wrote a 10,000 line Perl script.

He thought himself how to write Perl in a week. And then started coding. He wrote a script to automate a very tedious testing process so perfectly, we were able to reduce our test team by like 70% and test more precisely than before.

It was fully procedural code. And it looked monstrous. Our architect challenged him that it won't workout. He even challenged to rewrite it in Java, but that project never finished. He was never able to ever complete the rewrite.

It motivated me to learn Perl. Since then my life has been totally different. I've done mountains of work alone working, hacking during nights.

I learned the following things from that episode:

1. First write the program.

2. Write the correct program.

3. Write the program to run fast and efficient(scalability and all that)

4. Beautify the program.

But most people never cross 2)- The point is there are tons of people who can do this tasks related to micro optimization. The people who win in a ordinary work environment are ones who know the art of converting ideas to sell able products in the fastest way possible.

By the way that manager also wrote database clients in C++ which helped us troubleshoot our in memory databases from remote locations. Again the architect challenged to get it done Java, as before the project never completed :)

Its a fact that majority of the software world is hacked and held in existence with tools like Perl and Php. The people who care about artistic elegance are few, they often fail and generally don't matter.

arethuza3• 14 years ago

Isn't your list a variation on the well known list of:

- Make it work

- Make it right

- Make it fast

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?MakeItWorkMakeItRightMakeItFast

alexchamberlain4• 14 years ago

The architect sounds obsessed with Java... first sign of craziness!

Disclaimer: I like C/C++/Python.

thewarrior• 14 years ago

I would like to make a few points , This is only possible because your dad is the only one who has to deal with this program and also he only works on this one big complex thing which he knows really well .

cubicle673• 14 years ago

oh hell yeah, absolutely. This sort of code is not uncommon at all but is pretty much incomprehensible (let alone maintainable) for anyone beyond the original implementer

ajuc2• 14 years ago

Because understanding exactly what program should do is more important than understanding what are best practices in CS, or how to abstract things.

If you can keep all interactions of your app in your head, then it doesn't matter how badly designed the code is. Architecture is only important because it makes it possible to change things without understanding the whole thing.

And complete understanding with bad architecture beats good architecture with incomplete understanding.

kamaal4• 14 years ago

>Architecture is only important because it makes it possible to change things without understanding the whole thing.

And for that you need to understand the architecture, ofcourse.

You always need to understand something_(n-1) to understand something_n, ad infinitum

arethuza3• 14 years ago

I've never seen anything labelled a "best practise" that has had anything to do with what I would call CS.

anabis• 14 years ago

The version given to me by my professor was: "Think like an amateur. Execute as an expert."

Originally by Takeo Kanade. ( http://www.cs.cmu.edu/interviews/kanade/ )

tikhonj• 14 years ago

Here's my version of his opinions, probably even more controversial :P.

CS should be offered as a major by itself. All the most interesting stuff is CS-specific with indirect applications. Working on something like automatic programming is far more exciting than working on biology or art or what have you. (I can't think of anything more awesome or more CS-only than automatic programming.)

It is a mistake to introduce programmers to OOP.

A complex compiler is awesome. A sufficiently smart compiler may be a myth, but it is a utopian myth; we should strive for it. However, I would take it even further: program synthesis is better still. I'm in the business of telling the computer what to do, not how to do it, so there should be no obvious but unnecessary correspondence between what I write and what the computer executes--they just have to have the same semantics.

You shouldn't be allowed to write a library unless you have a thorough understanding of programming languages and some relevant math. There is always relevant math. Your functions should be accompanied by useful and verifiable laws others can depend on. Or maybe everyone should be encouraged to write libraries regardless of skill level and then the libraries could be ranked a posteriori. Any other guidelines make less sense.

Pretty code is readable and readable code is pretty. If you can render your code as a nice pdf and distribute it as a paper, it's about as readable as it will ever be. Even if you can't, remember that aesthetics aren't random--there is a reason why pretty code is pretty.

Purely functional programming is a straw man. Even Haskell lets you write code that at least acts impure. Haskell is a local maximum. On the other hand: a purely functional spec that the computer uses to generate a potentially impure program should work. But I've already talked about that :P.

I don't know what a "software engineering mindeset" is. It sounds like something a manager would say. Don't do stuff a manager would say. This is unfair to good managers but still a useful guideline. Have as much fun as you can unless people's lives are on the line.

I should note that I don't even think all these opinions are true. But a belief does not have to be true to be useful. If I could boil it down to a single sentence, it would probably be: math and CS theory aren't scary and you should reject conventional "wisdom". But that would be somewhat cheap--two independent and rather unrelated clauses joined with "and" may as well be two sentences :P.

Also, there's something very appealing about throwing out intentionally extreme opinions. I can certainly see why this guy keeps on writing his blog.

regularfry4• 14 years ago

I wouldn't be so quick to throw away the "software engineering mindset" quite so quickly. Part of an engineering mindset is roughly "I am prepared to stand up in court and defend all the choices I made designing this product to a jury of my peers". If we can get to that point, where there is a set of guidelines so clear, and so universally accepted, that you could get 12 arbitrary software developers to uniformly agree that the designer chose well in following them, and we could actually use them to do useful design work, that would be such a huge step forward that the profession would change unrecognisably.

We're not there yet.

enjo3• 14 years ago

I'll restate this: "Every programmer should know more than a little bit about typography". I was amazed at how much learning design fundamentals improved me as a programmer. I've learned to communicate through code much more effectively than I ever had before. Thinking about grouping, spacing, and the like leads not only to more readable ("pretty") code but usually more efficient code as well.

jbrechtel• 14 years ago

Can you suggest any books?

kenmazy• 14 years ago

Not sure how you can love automatic programming but dismiss biology. Humans are an operating system that is not only time dependent, but spatial and gradient dependent self mutating automatic programming with asynchronous message passing that is also time/spatial/gradient dependent.

Oh yea, and inserting breakpoints and print statements not only take months, but also change your code in a case-by-case fashion.

It's like reverse engineering for masochists.

davedx• 14 years ago

"Superficially ugly code is irrelevant. Pretty formatting--or lack thereof--has no bearing on whether the code works and is reliable, and that kind of mechanical fiddling is better left to an automated tool."

I disagree with this one. Clear, readable code is... clear and readable. It's like not bothering to format text in a textbook because "the meat of the matter is in there, so who cares?"

Of course substance is more important than style in programming, but style also helps and is it really that much effort to make sure your code is readable for the next guy who comes along?

pepve2• 14 years ago

I agree with you. What i took away from that point was to leave it to an automated tool. Th Eclipse Java formatter was the first time I saw this work. Distribute the formatter settings among your team, make everyone set the "format on save" option, be done with it.

I just wish all languages had this kind of support.

qu4z-22• 14 years ago

"indent" the program (for C) has been around for a while.

The other nice thing about automated formatting is that everyone can edit code in their preferred format, as long as they convert it back before checking in (for readable diffs)

qznc• 14 years ago

The difference between a compiler not optimizing (gcc -O0) and optimizing as good as possible (gcc -O3) can be an order of magnitude of performance. That does matter in many cases.

Of course, various programs (web apps) are IO-bound. And gcc -O0 should still outperform Python/Ruby/etc.

InclinedPlane3• 14 years ago

I would go farther in regard to the Computer Science point.

CS programs should be burnt to the ground. And in their place we should build up three separate things. First, software trade schools that are actually good (e.g. not ITT). Second, for reals software engineering majors at colleges, that are heavy on things like practical programming, tools (version control, issue tracking, automated build systems), refactoring, teach multiple languages (javascript, python, ruby, SQL, etc.), and only delve into theoretical underpinnings as warranted (compare electrical engineering vs. physics programs). Third, legitimate Computer Science programs that are contractually limited to about 5% of the current CS student capacity for at least the next two decades and which teach a very mathematics heavy and science focused CS program and have zero expectation that the graduates of the program will go on to write software in industry after graduation.

akurilin• 14 years ago

N.2 on your list does already exist in the real world, albeit as a graduate program. CMU offers Software Engineering (with very minimal CS involved) at both the main and SV campuses, perhaps even at others as well.

UK-AL3• 14 years ago

The problem with software trade schools, even though you may not require a pure maths focus, I still expect people who program professionally to be good at maths. I would expect most programmers to analyse algorithms in a formal manner if they have to. And the people capable of doing maths at that level are not the people that traditionally go to trade schools.

pepve2• 14 years ago

To make something fast or to make something scale you don't need a proof. You need a profiler.

AndrewDucker• 14 years ago

I know almost no programmers who analyst algorithms in a formal manner.

Most coding doesn't require it - certainly not the kind of thing that most large companies want coders for.

AngryParsley• 14 years ago

I just read the post that inspired this post: http://programmers.blogoverflow.com/2012/08/20-controversial.... While a lot of these opinions sound reasonable, I want to know if they're actually true. All of these statements are expert opinions, but it's unclear how many of them are backed by research. Without controlled studies, experts can easily believe incorrect things.

If you hold an opinion, look at the evidence backing it up. If it's not strong, reduce your confidence. Or even better: Gather evidence, then form your opinion. And remember: Anecdotes don't count. I wish more of my colleagues would do this, but it seems most of them haven't heard of very many software-related studies.

If you want to learn more, I recommend http://www.neverworkintheory.org/ as a starting point. After reading some papers, you'll be surprised how limited our evidence-based knowledge is. Looking at software engineering studies made me realize that I'm not allowed to poke fun at psychology anymore. Even that field is more evidence-based than ours.

polemic• 14 years ago

> Computer science should only be offered as a minor. You can major in biology, minor in computer science. Major in art, minor in computer science. But you can't get a degree in CS.

The problem is not that Universities produce poor CS majors. They don't. The problem is that everyone else expects that a CS major is going to be a good commercial developer. Some are, but that's just the odds.

If you want to be a programmer, do an software ENGINEERING degree. It deals with the practical issues and you actually do lots of real, actual, programming. Or go to a media design school, where you do lots of actual web programming.

Expecting every CS major to be a great programmer, is like expecting every Physics major to be a good baseball player. Sure, (s)he knows the optimal angle to strike ball to achieve a home run, but actually doing so requires a whole of experience and real world context.

(PS. I have a physics degree, and I'm a software developer, not a baseball player. But that's because I programmed a lot for fun and profit before going to university, and CS seemed like a big backwards step. And physics is more fun.)

primitur• 14 years ago

I agree with the first 10 controversial opinions, and I agree with this followup, to boot. All good points, all worthy of discussion.

As an autocrat, I'd also add another few, what I conceive to be contemporaneously controversial point of view, to the discussion:

* Code Coverage matters. Dead code is broken code. Always.

* Programming is Always in Service To The User. The User is the only way your creative, artistic, amazing, junk of spaghetti-code crud, is going to ever get Used. Use is where your software is alive. Non-use = Dead. Thus, the USER is YOUR MASTER. Serve them.

* Pretty tools are one thing, ugly tools another thing entirely. NO! WRONG! ALL TOOLS ARE TOOLS. Use what works. If you're using something because you want to, even though it sort of doesn't work, its no longer a tool, but instead an .. ingredient .. of something. Something else, perhaps something creative. Do that shit on your own time: use the tools which work, at work.

* Discussion is the only way things ever get resolved. If you hate on something about someone, discussion is the only way the problem will ever get solved, ever. Ignoring something and being afraid to discuss really secretly means 'do not want' to solve the problem. Even vile words are still yet but words, words eventually work it out. Developers who do not use words are not the scribes they're meant to be ..

walrus3• 14 years ago

> Purely functional programming doesn't work, but if you mix in a small amount of imperative code then it does.

That isn't controversial nor is it an opinion. It's just the truth. Purely functional code has no side effects. The entire point of a program is to have side effects.

johnpattiyson• 14 years ago

Not true. For example, a compiler can be a pure function. It accepts input that is the source code, and outputs the machine code. There's no side effect there. I admit it needs minor scaffolding to always read all of stdin first, and write all to stdout at the end, but the programme, as written by the programmer, is a pure function.

This is one of several ways that Haskell worked before there was an IO monad [1], all allowing pure functional useful programmes.

[1] S. Peyton Jones. Tackling the awkward squad: monadic input/output, concurrency, exceptions, and foreign-language calls in haskell. Technical report, Microsoft Research, Cambridge, 2010.

pufuwozu• 14 years ago

This is even the case after the introduction of the IO monad. Monads allow referentially transparent IO.

My purely functional programs actually do things! Amazing that my ivory tower allows me to say "Hello World".

walrus3• 14 years ago

Yes, the 'minor scaffolding' has side effects. That's why I said it wasn't controversial.

Tycho2• 14 years ago

I prefer to mix in a small amount (well, as much as I can before it starts to feel forced) if FP into my imperative programs.

sbt• 14 years ago

Great stuff. Since these are controversial opinions, I somewhat agree/disagree.

- Computer science should only be offered as a minor. Good point, assuming that you don't consider theory an end in it self. I consider theory mind opening, even if it doesn't make money per se.

- It's a mistake to introduce new programmers to OOP before they understand the basics.. Fully agree.

- You shouldn't be allowed to write a library for use by other people until you have ten years of programming under your belt. Another good point. Writing a good library (or designing an API) is one of the more challenging things you can do, because it requires a good understanding of the problem, simple design, and sensitivity to conventions (which only come from long experience).

- Superficially ugly code is irrelevant. Somewhat true, but the main problem with ugly code is that nobody wants to touch it. So if its functionally correct, readability remains irrelevant until you need to make a change.

- Purely functional programming doesn't work Agree, in the sense that there exists problems where a purely functional approach is not the best. I think you can run pretty far with purely functional though.

- A software engineering mindset can prevent you from making great things. Strictly true, but it should be said that the opposite mindset will eventually destroy the things you made.

Hopefully more controversial programming opinions

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