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0 pointsTeMPOraL6y ago0 comments

There is something to that, but it applies at the (predicted) end of one's career. But what I'm writing about applies at the beginning - the idea that being forever stuck at a level of skill only a tiny bit higher than what an average developer enters their first job with.

EDIT: RE debugging functional code, I don't find it in any way more difficult than imperative - but with a caveat that my functional programming experience is limited to typical for Lisp, Clojure and Erlang, and not e.g. Haskell. With functional code, you just hook up in some place in the pipeline and start leaking what's coming in and out of there to the outside world (stdout, REPL, debugger). Because it's functional, you can be sure you're not missing any hidden state. You can keep replying the calls manually, perhaps tweaking inputs, to identify the problem. After finding and fixing a bug, it's relatively trivial to turn your debugging work into a regression test.

It seems to me that your complaint is less about functional code and more about point-free style, which is arguably a bit more difficult to hook into, but only because debugging tools aren't really optimized for it.

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tabtab6y ago· 2 in thread

One has to write code intended for a variety of readers having different skill levels. In practice you have to "dumb it down" to a degree.

TeMPOraLOP6y ago

To a degree. Not to the lowest possible level. You can and should have some expectations of the people who work on the project, and if new people don't meet those expectations, they should be trained on the job until they do. It's better than forgoing the leverage the more complex tools give you.

I mean, imagine if civil engineers started restricting their designs to work only with hand shovels, on the assumption that excavators are evil because a random construction worker won't know how to operate one.

tabtab6y ago

It's a matter of economics of the labor pool. Companies often want high-skilled developers on the cheap, and then act surprised when they can't actually find any at their offer level (or they have poor people/team skills). Nor do they often want to pay and/or wait for training. Maybe there is a good reason they do that but from our techie perspective can't see. Unless you walk a mile in an owner's shoes, it's hard to say. Either way, they probably won't change this pattern, and thus one should code for a lower common denominator. We can't re-code the world.

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