undefined | Better HN

0 pointsaprdm5y ago0 comments

I agree with you that is obvious at first glance now a days but I wouldn't want to see it written like that in Python at least...

I would prefer to have small functions named after what it is accomplishing and then have 2 function calls..

something like

  list_of_grades = [1 , 2, 3 4]
  adjusted_list_of_grades = 
  apply_end_of_semester_grade_adjustment(list_of_grades)
  odd_grades = remove_even_grades(adjusted_list_of_grades)

Of course that this example is very silly but understanding why a transformation is happening when you're looking an old code base that you don't have the context is easier w/ a function and docstring that explains it than a map or filter

(IMO)

0 comments

15 comments · 8 top-level

dnautics5y ago· 4 in thread

I think also we have learned why map/reduce or functional recursion is better than for loops - because the state of the system is explicitly contained; with a for loop you could literally mutate anything in scope, so the cognitive burden to understanding the process is potentially unbounded; with map, your state between iterations is nothing, and with reduce, it's strictly what you can stash in your accumulator.

I was laughing at myself the other week because I was having so much trouble writing a for loop because I had gotten used to the explicitness of the functional iteration operatiors

rkangel5y ago

> with a for loop you could literally mutate anything in scope

That depends on the language. In Elixir for instance, you can't mutate anything. Elixir does have 'for comprehensions', and there are things that you can express very clearly in what is effectively a for loop that would be much harder to read in a chain of iterators.

dnautics5y ago

That's not strictly true. You could use the process dictionary to keep hidden mutable state in the for loop. Don't do this.

thedanbob5y ago

Same here. I maintain around 30 small-to-medium size Ruby projects and in all that code I can only remember writing a single for loop. On the plus side, I am highly confident that code works right since I spent so much time thinking about it!

higerordermap5y ago

Mutation is the scapegoat here. It's all about expressing intent.

Eg: I would take a count_if(condition) function over filtering and then taking the length.

barrkel5y ago· 3 in thread

The problem with this is that you've replaced the code with comments about the code - that's what long method names are, comments. And like comments, they stagnate while the code they reference evolves.

Someone else reading this code in a few years time will need to look into the definitions of each of those method calls in order to understand the code, because names can't be trusted. All the more so with instance methods, as they may access arbitrary instance state to do their work, so that non-local (to the calling point) state may influence meaning.

Single use small methods need to justify their existence to avoid being inlined; they need a smidgen more purpose than a comment, or they hurt readability long term more than they help.

hultner5y ago

I understand where you are coming from but I don’t agree.

Yes in a low quality codebase with focus on producing changes quickly and not maintainability it is true that the code will change but comments/names stagnate. What you are referring to is reinforcing a problem a cultural and organizational issue, which left unkept will make progress stagnate in the long run.

But in a high quality codebase armed with proper peer-reviews this divergence of name and implementation won’t be tolerated and if such divergence exists it should be considered a bug not the expected state of things, such a defect should be resolved when found instead of making it the norm that you can’t trust the code base.

What if we couldn’t trust that parts in our cars and heavy machinery does what they say, I wouldn’t want to tear down the engine every time I’m about to use a car just to make sure there’s actually an engine inside and it’s not a fridge compressor due to implementation diverging over generations. This is of course an extreme example but what I’m saying is that we should allow our code to decline into such a state to begin with.

barrkel5y ago

> high quality codebase armed with proper peer-reviews

This is a No True Scotsman argument. Of course if you assume a process which prevents problems, you won't get problems.

I don't believe it though. People make compromises in the face of conflicting demands; technical debt is taken on in order to get features to market sooner. Developers churn; new developers are hired who have less context and take shortcuts, and other newer developers review and approve their code. In large systems, developers may have been working for years but still be unfamiliar with different corners of the codebase; newness is path dependent.

> What if we couldn’t trust that parts in our cars and heavy machinery does what they say

This analogy doesn't really fly. Software isn't subject to physical constraints on local action.

Functions are abstractions. There's a handy rule of thumb about abstractions: don't create an abstraction until you have three different uses. Now I think functions are fairly lightweight abstractions and are generally malleable, so I wouldn't really apply it. But the principle behind the rule is still sound. Multiple users keep an abstraction honest. They stop it growing hairs and warts specific to a single user, which bleed hidden dependencies across the abstraction boundary.

hackerfromthefu5y ago

Are the downvoters perl programmers?

lawn5y ago

It's all context dependent of course but in this example the original example is far more readable. Sometimes more abstractions make it harder to understand how everything fits together.

If you really want to document it more wrap the map/filter inside a single function, assign it to an aptly named variable or add a comment above.

You also introduce a refactoring problem when you split it out in functions as you now need to consider that it may be called in other places too.

nemetroid5y ago

I think this is reading too much into the toy example, but I want to mention a drawback of your rewrite: in the original, map and filter made it clear that all logic was happening element-wise. By creating functions that take the entire list as input, this has been obscured.

antfarm5y ago

To me as well, good readability means not having to read too much.

Here is a code example from the front page of the official Python website [python.org]:

  >>> numbers = [2, 4, 6, 8]
  >>> product = 1
  >>> for number in numbers:
  ...    product = product * number

Compared to the Ruby equivalent,

  product = [2, 4, 6, 8].inject(:*)

this feels like unnecessary bloat that makes it harder to understand what is going on in the larger picture, i.e. the unit of code this is a part of.

throwaway_pdp095y ago

I understand, but that's IMO far too wordy. You will get better at reading things functionally and you'll start to move towards the original one-liner style, but some people take it too far.

I actually did last night what you prefer, pulled a small lambda out of a map and named it.

dkarl5y ago

I think I'm in between somewhere. I do love named intermediate results as documentation. I love that functional code composes so well that you don't have to give names to every value... but I hate when people abuse it to eliminate all names.

Oftentimes, if I have a one or two line function that is only used in one place, I prefer to have it inline and use a named intermediate value to document its meaning.

  grades_with_end_of_semester_adjustment = grades.map(x => 
    code code code
      code code code code code
  )

  odd_adjusted_grades = grades_with_end_of_semester_adjustment.filter(x => 
    x % 2 != 0
  )

mtberatwork5y ago

The Pythonic way though is to use list comprehension and generator expressions over map/filter.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse