Comment by jandrewrogers

Comment by jandrewrogers 13 hours ago

5 replies

I have seen many systems that were overly complicated because the developers couldn’t keep it all in their head. It led instead to poorly designed modularity along boundaries selected to be small enough that they could keep it in their heads, to the detriment of both efficiency and maintainability.

Being able to see across it at scale is what exposes elegant reductions to something simpler, which enhances maintainability. It is how you end up with the commits that delete a thousand lines of code.

cyanydeez 26 minutes ago

Yeah, there's just no magic bullet: a single file with all the code is easy to ctrlf but context disappears. Multiple folders mimics hierarchy and dependency but can easily mismatch control structure or circularity of flow.

What might help is a LLM that could seamlessly create various overlay files which would be editable allowing for differing usecases eitger project determinative or coder preferences.

IDEs try to do this but the success of vscode suggests theres space for multiview editors.

agumonkey 7 hours ago

Plus people with intellectual limitations are not immune to their own variant of over engineering. They will at times pile up useless layers and intermediate steps thinking they created something incredible or replicated badly something they saw on YouTube the week before.

  • fragmede an hour ago

    "having as much working memory as possible as is useful. don't remember inconsequential details" isn't very actionable. someone could turn that into a blog post that only nerds would be interested in reading. I don't use that term pejoratively though.

paulddraper 12 hours ago

100%

This is how you wind up having tons of pointless parts and layers, because no one could understand the system from end to end.

Blind men plus elephant, vs seeing men plus elephant.

  • cyanydeez 21 minutes ago

    I find it funny that type systems often confuse me even though theyre trying clarify the the components, and while in a few more seconds i can parse them, i simply cant scan them.

    So even though i can write systdms complicated enought to require good types, because naming fails, i cannot because the use of all the arbitrary symbolics is a speed bump.