• 0 Posts
  • 173 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

help-circle


  • This is something often repeated by OOP people but that doesn’t actually hold up in practice. Maintainability comes from true separation of concerns, which OOP is really bad at because it encourages implicit, invisible, stateful manipulation across disparate parts of a codebase.

    I work on a Haskell codebase in production of half a million lines of Haskell supported by 11 developers including myself, and the codebase is rapidly expanding with new features. This would be incredibly difficult in an OOP language. It’s very challenging to read unfamiliar code in an OOP language and quickly understand what it’s doing; there’s so much implicit behavior that you have to track down before any of it makes sense. It is far, far easier to reason about a program when the bulk of it is comprised of pure functions taking in some input and producing some output. There’s a reason that pure functions are the textbook example of testable code, and that reason is because they are much easier to understand. Code that’s easier to understand is code that’s easier to maintain.




  • Interactive rebase? There’s no GUI that actually does that well, if at all. And it’s a massive part of my daily workflow.

    The CLI is far, far more powerful and has many features that GUIs do not.

    It’s also scriptable. For example, I often like to see just the commits I’ve made that diverge from master, along with the files changed in each. This can be accomplished with git log --oneline --stat --name-status origin/master..HEAD. What’s more, since this is just a CLI command, I can very easily make a keybind in vim to execute the command and stick it’s output into a split window. This lets me use git as a navigation tool as I can then very quickly jump to files that I’ve changed in some recent commit.

    This is all using a standard, uniform interface without mucking around with IDE plugin settings (if they even can do such a thing). I have many, many other examples of scripting with it, such as loading side-by-side diffs for all files in the worktree against some particular commit (defaulting to master) in vim in a tabpage-per-file, which I often use to review all of my changes before making a commit.





  • I’m sure it’s fine for small-scale usage, but overall it’s extremely inflexible and doesn’t really scale well at all. There’s also a lot of very basic functionality that’s straight up missing. For example, there’s no way to have a global epic priority. You can rearrange epics in an epic board, but the ordering of the epics there is not persisted elsewhere. There were many, many other shortcomings we kept running into.

    Oh, and after a lot of our tickets had been imported (which itself was a huge undertaking since the auto import tools are complete trash), it started to be very slow. It feels like a very unfinished, unpolished product.

    We use Gitlab’s CI/CD features extensively at my current job and it’s very, very nice. That’s what they are actually good at, not project management.







  • Nah, it’s all hyped up bullshit that has to be babysat and manipulated to a degree that you may as well just write your damn code.

    But beyond that, I’d argue that it’s actually damaging for engineering organizations, because it means the org is incurring the maintenance cost of code not written by its engineers and that has no real thought put behind it. Maybe you can eventually coax it to produce code that’s not completely broken shit, but it’s code that your org doesn’t actually “own” from a maintenance and knowledge-base perspective. The social aspect of code maintenance with this shit is always massively overlooked.




  • I made this mistake for ages because Haskell is so popular and it’s functional and pure, but it’s not actually a requirement for functional languages to be pure. OCaml isn’t.

    I didn’t say that FP languages have to necessarily be pure, just that FP languages tackle the problem of mutation by arranging programs such that most things are typically pure and side effects typically happen at the periphery (logging is probably the one exception, though). This is true even in FP languages that allow arbitrary side effects in functions, it’s just not enforced by a compiler.

    I agree Rust code has a different feel to OCaml code but that’s because it makes some things easier (e.g. mutation, vectors). You still could write Rust as if it was OCaml (except for the lack of currying), it’s just that nobody does that because it sucks.

    That’s the entire point, though. It’s all about what the language emphasizes and makes easy to do. If it’s unnatural to write a functional program in Rust and no one does it, then it’s not really reasonable to call it a functional language. Writing functional programs is not idiomatic Rust, and that’s okay.


  • Fundamentally it’s a language oriented around blocks of statements rather than composition of expressions. Additionally, it takes a different approach to the mutation problem than FP languages: where FP seeks to make most things pure and push mutation and side effects to the edges of the program, Rust uses its type system to make such mutation and side effects more sane. It’s an entirely different philosophy when it comes to programming. I don’t think either approach is necessarily better, mind you, just a different set of tradeoffs.

    I’m a professional Haskell developer and am very much immersed in FP. When I read Rust code, I have to completely shift my thinking to something much more imperative. Whereas if I read, say, Ocaml, the difference is mostly syntactic. This isn’t a slight, mind you. I quite like Rust. But it’s a very different paradigm.