Re:Reflections on 10k Hours of Programming
by hinkley on Saturday August 07, 2021 @03:31PM
(#28101191)
To an extent List Comprehensions are, if not a fix, at least an analgesic. But FP is definitely a case of The Future is Here, It's Just Not Evenly Distributed. Calling it an 'advance' might be a stretch, at this point. Lost wisdom?
I would chalk the complexity of the example you provided up to the inability of half of developers to handle four nested conditionals, and for most of the rest to handle five.
I sort of handwaved over the Death By A Thousand Cuts scenario, which I definitely believe is important. It doesn't matter how idiomatic your code is if you have enough of it. I don't maintain that idiomatic code is free by any means. It just doesn't have the factorial surface area of spaghetti code. It scales better, but scale absolutely matters.
If you count conditional branches, you'll see that parts of this code are pushing up against those limits. You're definitely into 'how' territory, but you've also shunted it off to a function that just 'does stuff'. So my code that relies on this for step 1 of a bigger answer doesn't give a shit (as long as the answer is correct, including boundary conditions).
I would chalk the complexity of the example you provided up to the inability of half of developers to handle four nested conditionals, and for most of the rest to handle five.
I sort of handwaved over the Death By A Thousand Cuts scenario, which I definitely believe is important. It doesn't matter how idiomatic your code is if you have enough of it. I don't maintain that idiomatic code is free by any means. It just doesn't have the factorial surface area of spaghetti code. It scales better, but scale absolutely matters.
If you count conditional branches, you'll see that parts of this code are pushing up against those limits. You're definitely into 'how' territory, but you've also shunted it off to a function that just 'does stuff'. So my code that relies on this for step 1 of a bigger answer doesn't give a shit (as long as the answer is correct, including boundary conditions).