| ▲ | iamflimflam1 5 hours ago |
| > I have seen people take this to some bizarre alternate insanity of their own creation as a law to never measure anything, typically because the given developer cannot measure things. Similar to the "code should be self documenting - ergo: We don't write any comments, ever" |
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| ▲ | f1shy 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| It is to me incredible, how many „developers“, even “10 years senior developers” have no idea how to use a dubugger and or profiler. I’ve even met some that asked “what is a profiler?”
I hope I’m not insulting anybody, but to me is like going to an “experienced mechanic” and they don’t know what a screwdriver is. |
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| ▲ | afpx 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The last time I interviewed (around 10 years ago) I was surprised when 9 of the 10 senior developers didn't know how many bits were in basic elemetary types. (Then, shortly afterward I also tried to find a new job, realized the entire industry had changed, and was fortunate enough to decide it wasn't worth the trouble.) | | |
| ▲ | WalterBright 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > 9 of the 10 senior developers didn't know how many bits were in basic elemetary types That's likely thanks to C which goes to great pains to not specify the size of the basic types. For example, for 64 bit architectures, "long" is 32 bits on the Mac and 64 bits everywhere else. The net result of that is I never use C "long", instead using "int" and "long long". This mess is why D has 32 bit ints and 64 bit longs, whether it's a 32 bit machine or a 64 bit machine. The result was we haven't had porting problems with integer sizes. | | |
| ▲ | switchbak 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It's substantially worse on the JVM. One's intuition from C just fails when you have to think about references vs primitives, and the overhead of those (with or without compressed OOPs). I've met very few folks who understand the overheads involved, and how extreme the benefits can be from avoiding those. | | |
| ▲ | Quarrelsome 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Conversely I've met many folks who come into managed environments and piss away time trying to wrangle the managed system into how they think it should work, instead of accepting that clever people wrote it and guidelines when followed result in acceptable outcomes. The sort of insane stuff I've seen on the dotnet repo where people are trying to tear apart the entire type system just because they think they've cracked some secret performance code. |
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| ▲ | afpx 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | That's a reasonable answer. But, I meant they seemed to have little understanding or interest. I don't interview much, and I'm probably a poor interviewer. But, I guess I was expecting some discussion. | | |
| ▲ | WalterBright 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I ran into some comp sci graduates in the early 80's who did not know what a "register" was. To be fair, though, I come up short on a lot of things comp sci graduates know. It's why Andrei Alexandrescu and I made a good team. I was the engineer, and he the scientist. The yin and the yang, so to speak. |
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| ▲ | SAI_Peregrinus 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | How many bits are in an `int` in C? What do you mean "at least 16", that's ridiculous, nobody would write a language that leaves the number of bits in basic elementary types partially specified‽ | | |
| ▲ | bluGill 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | It is a good idea - most of the time you don't care, and on slower systems a large int is harmful since the system can't handle that much and it cost performance - go to the faster system with larger ints when you need larger intw. |
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| ▲ | ekidd 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I mean, as a senior developer, the number of bits in an "int" is "who the hell knows, because it has changed a bunch of times during my career, and that's what stdint.h is for." And let's not even talk about machines with 32-bit "char" types, which I actually had to program for once. If the number of bits isn't actually included right in the type name, then be very sure you know what you're doing. The senior engineer answer to "How many bits are there in an int?" is "No, stop, put that down before you put your eye out!" Which, to be fair, is the senior engineer answer to a lot of things. | |
| ▲ | estimator7292 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | On the one hand, in today's world asking how many bits is in an int is exactly as answerable as "how long is a piece of rope" On the other, the right answer is 16 or 32. It's not the correct answer, strictly speaking, but it is the right one. | | |
| ▲ | jandrewrogers 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | An 'int' is also 64 bits on some platforms. | |
| ▲ | fragmede an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's the wrong question. How many bits is uint64 is a much better question, if we're at a place where that's relevant. |
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| ▲ | didgetmaster an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | I once interviewed at Microsoft. The hiring manager asked me how I would go about programming a break point if I were writing a debugger. I started to explain how I would have to swap out an instruction to put an INT 3 in the code and then replace it when the breakpoint would hit. He stopped me an said he was just looking to see if I knew what an INT 3 was. He said few engineers he interviewed had any idea. |
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| ▲ | alexjplant 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > "code should be self documenting It should be to the greatest extent possible. Strive to write literate code before writing a comment. Comments should be how and why, not what. > - ergo: We don't write any comments, ever" Indeed this does not logically follow. Writing fluent, idiomatic code with real names for symbols and obvious control flow beats writing brain teasers riddled with comments that are necessary because of the difficulty in parsing a 15-line statement with triply-nested closures and single-letter variable names. There's a wide middle ground where comments are leveraged, not made out of necessity. |
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| ▲ | Sharlin an hour ago | parent [-] | | You misunderstood the GP - they were criticizing the way some programmers use "code should be self-documenting" as an excuse when they actually mean "I’m too lazy to write comments even when I really should". Just like "premature optimization is bad" may in fact mean something like "I never bothered to learn how to measure and reason about performance" | | |
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| ▲ | p0nce 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Laziness in moral clothing. |
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| ▲ | msla 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > Similar to the "code should be self documenting - ergo: We don't write any comments, ever" My counterpoint: Code can be self-documenting, reality isn't. You can have a perfectly clear method that does something nobody will ever understand unless you have plenty of documentation about why that specific thing needs to be done, and why it can't be simpler. Like having special-casing for DST in Arizona, which no other state seems to need: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_the_United_States |
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| ▲ | pc86 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This isn't a counterpoint, it's just additional (and barely relevant) information. | | |
| ▲ | msla 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | It's a counterpoint to the maxim, not the post I'm replying to. |
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| ▲ | switchbak 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Documenting it in a way that ensures it satisfies the example case would be preferred. You know, like with a test. |
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