Programming

17507 readers

9 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

snowe

Ategon

[email protected]

Typing is not a programming bottleneck (blog.ploeh.dk)

submitted 1 year ago by canpolat to c/programming

47 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] lysdexic 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

From the article:

(...) but recently, another type of criticism seems to be on the rise.

The code that I suggest is too verbose. It involves too much typing.

This reads like a one-sentence strawman. Describing code as "too verbose" is really not about the risk of carpal tunnel syndrome. It's about readability and cognitive load.

The blogger seems to almost get the point when he writes the following:

In short, the purpose of source code is to communicate the workings of a piece of software to the next programmer who comes along. This could easily include your future self.

The purpose of source code is to communicate (...) to the next programmer who comes along.

If you make the mistake of going the "enterprise quality java code" meme approach, you're making the next programmer's life needlessly harder.

The blogger then tries to make his case with verbose code, and makes the following statement:

Which alternative is better? The short version is eight lines of code, including the curly brackets. The longer version is 78 lines of code. That's ten times as much.

I prefer the longer version. While it takes longer to type, it comes with several benefits. (...)

This is yet another strawman. The longer version is awful code, not because it's longer but because it's needlessly jam-packed of boilerplate code. Ignorign basic things like interfaces and contracts, It's been proven already that bugs in code are directly proportional to the number of lines of code, and thus the code the author prefers is likely to pack ten times more bugs.

The shorter code in this case would not be the 78-loc mess that the author picked as the thing he prefers. The shorter code in this case would be something like onboarding the project onto Project Lombok to handle all-args constructors, property methods, and even throw a builder in for free. This requires onboarding Lombok to the project, and add two annotations to the short example. Two lines of code, done.

After the blogger fails to make his case, he doubles down on the typing non-sequitur:

Perhaps you're now convinced that typing speed may not be the bottleneck (...)

This is a blog post that fails to justify a click. It's in the territory of "not even wrong".