Re:Don't DRY Your Code Prematurely
by alex_smart on Thursday May 30, 2024 @04:57PM
(#40528634)
>It's not like webpage space is expensive.
It is not the webpage space. It is people's limited attention spans and ability to focus. A complex example is needed to properly motivate certain concepts, but too complex an example also contains too many other details that the reader gets bogged down/distracted from the main concept being discussed.
At least that is my hypothesis for why almost all programming books and tutorials have terrible examples. I am happy to be proven wrong.
Coming back to the article, I looked at some of the previous articles from the same series, and to me it feels like a very conscious decision to only include 3-4 line code examples.
It is not the webpage space. It is people's limited attention spans and ability to focus. A complex example is needed to properly motivate certain concepts, but too complex an example also contains too many other details that the reader gets bogged down/distracted from the main concept being discussed.
At least that is my hypothesis for why almost all programming books and tutorials have terrible examples. I am happy to be proven wrong.
Coming back to the article, I looked at some of the previous articles from the same series, and to me it feels like a very conscious decision to only include 3-4 line code examples.