The conversation

cqqxo4zV46cpHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

Our final assignment for this unit was to build a piece of software, following some provided …

… Our final assignment for this unit was to build a piece of software, following some provided specification, and to write some supplementary document justifying the patterns that we used. A mature-aged student that had a little bit of industry experience under his belt didn’t use a single pattern we learned about the entire semester. His code was much more simple as a result. He put less effort in, even when taking into account his prior experience. His justifying documentation simply said something to the effect of “when considering the overall complexity of this problem, and the circumstances under which this software is being written, I don’t see any net benefit to using any of the patterns we learned about”. He got full marks. Not in a “I tricked the lecturer!” way. I was, and still am, a massive fan of the academic that ran the unit. …

Original discussionThe 4-chan Go programmer172 source comments · at import
2

What was this responding to?

Parent context · original excerpt

WE
weitendorfHN

This is actually really bad practice and a very “over eager junior engineer” way of writing software. You’re not off base at all that it seems excessive and confusing. It’s the kind of thing that seems technically complex and maybe even “elegant” (in isolation, when you first write the “interesting” code) at first but becomes a technical nightmare when used in real software that has to grow around and with it. You’re actually more on point in worrying about the understandability and debuggability this introduces. I spent the better part of two years unfucking some Go software that (among other things) misused channels. The problem with channels is that you rarely actually need them, but can use them for a lot of different things without too much initial difficulty. I think a good litmus test for proper use of channels is if you answer no to “could this be done with a direct function call…

Full original

Community replies 0

No community replies yet. Add your perspective.

Replies from the source 2

Direct replies available in this import. Original-language excerpts.

BI
bionsystemHN

So Grug was right all this time ? Joke apart this is a really interesting example. In a job interview I've been asked once if I ever regretted something I did and I couldn't quite word it on the spot, but definitely my first project included extra complexity just so that it "looked good" and in the end would have been more reliable had I kept it simple.

Full original
CU
cutemonsterHN

Nice with such teachers :-) What's a 200 level unit? It means it's "very advanced"?

Full original
Continue on Hacker News

Respect different perspectives. Share concrete experiences.

Sign in to post, reply, repost, and quote.