Re:Donald Knuth was framed
by mcv on Tuesday February 25, 2020 @03:29AM
(#22411671)
That's the thing here. Knuth can easily juggle far more complexity in his head than the average programmer, and that's fine for software that only he has to maintain. But when something needs to be maintainable by average programmers, you need to write for them and avoid that complexity.
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Re:Donald Knuth was framed
by squiggleblaz on Tuesday February 25, 2020 @05:00AM
(#22412028)
Who's writing for the average programmers? It's the average programmers. How can average programmers write code that is sufficiently abstract that it hides the complexity they can't handle? How can they change that code when it doesn't work? Does every company of 5 devs need to have a PhD?
Re:Donald Knuth was framed
by hyperpallium on Wednesday February 26, 2020 @02:56AM
(#22421226)
> How can average programmers write code that is sufficiently abstract that it hides the complexity they can't handle?
Well said.
Hiding complexity is harder than handling it. Designing an effective way to expose it for use amounts to (part of) a "programming system" [Brooks].
So it's library writers who hide the complexity for average programmers, with a "programming product": stdlib, open source project or (rarer these days) commercial "engine".
When there is no such library, we get the current state of our art: many projects failing.