[thelist] Coning conventions, pet peeves

[erik mattheis]

I have been thinking about JWW's thoughts.

There's a whole class of junior developers who learn to use frameworks but
not languages. Conventions are more important when part of the team
supporting the app does their work more by recognizing and duplicating
phrases - more like production work than development. Those developers are
taken into account when determining what is maintainable and not
maintainable.

Additionally, optimized code is not usually valuable these days, at least
in most web apps. Although it feels strange, it's reasonable to include
11,000 lines of JQuery to do a few simple tasks that only *need* a dozen
lines of optimized code.

Compare JQuery to CoffeeScript, which most developers are happy to see go:
it did nothing to widen any development bottleneck (perhaps with the
exception of the 2 or three coders in the world where typing speed is their
personal development bottleneck) - it just spit out JavaScript that was
only editable by developers who knew JS and CoffeeScript.

On Sun, May 1, 2016 at 3:18 AM, <subscription_thelist at harrier.ch> wrote:

>
> Interesting, equality is no longer associative. Is there actually a
> grammatical rule in English that forces the literal to the right? The
> anti-"Yoda" coalition seems to be bound by such.
>
> Back in the days I started coding (late '60s) when initial development
> tools were being refined, we were happy when we could just get them to make
> the hardware do what we wanted. Different to how it appears now, there was
> no right or wrong way to code, there was just maintainable and not
> maintainable. So some, like myself, developed their own constructs to allow
> our tools to help us better. This is one of them. (Restoring the state of
> all registers after returning from a subroutine was also one I was
> criticized for - which was later reflected in local variables in higher
> languages.) I found it was not a bad habit to maintain as one can never be
> 100% sure of design decisions made by current or future developers.
>
> I remember fighting this one with Sybase SQL - expressions would not be
> optimized if written in your so-called "Yoda" way. Shortsighted, but those
> were the tools at the time.
>
> Seems that in terms of coding, the time over for out-of-the-box thinking,
> even tho that is what got us to where we are today. But I know that, that's
> one of the main reasons I got out of industry. Ingenuity is no longer
> appreciated at this level. I have long stopped recommending coding as a
> long term career - after 4 major retooling efforts, the last two simply to
> satisfy managerial concerns, I decided to get off of the hamster wheel. The
> changes merely provided different ways to reach the same goal, driven by
> marketing, requiring a lot of effort and not enhancing my market value
> significantly.
>
> I can feel that all the young warriors on this list have now discounting
> me as a dinosaur. I write OO code in Perl, because it reduces my
> dependencies and I KNOW how to easily make it dance to my tune - I am in
> control. I'm not driven to keep up with the development package of the day.
> I still make my decisions based on actual value, not what is trendy and
> convenient. Oh well. At the end of the day, I'm confident that like me and
> my parents and their parents, today's advocates will also be reviled at by
> those of the future. Enjoy it while you can.
>
> Okay, I'll go back to lurking to further chuckle at the significance of
> current issues from the perspective of the past.
>
>
> jww
>
> ...>From:        Jason Handby <jason.handby at corestar.co.uk>
> ...>Subject:     Re: [thelist] Coning conventions, pet peeves
> ...>Date:        Thu, 28 Apr 2016 18:33:00 +0000
> ...>
> ...>> By putting the comparison
> ...>> the other way around - making sure that the thing to the left of the
> operator
> ...>> is not an lvalue - you make it harder to make this mistake.
> ...>
> ...>("lvalue" just means something that can legitimately go on the left of
> an assignment operator.)
> ...>
> ...>Jason
>
> --
>
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-- 
Erik Mattheis

http://www.flickr.com/gelk