Some people seem to do this automatically. They notice which things make code harder to work with and avoid them. Occasionally, they notice things that make working with code easier and make sure to include those bits in. I guess that’s how you get beautiful code like redis or Django.
But I’ve never seen any formal approach to this. I’ve gone down the software craftsmanship rabbit hole for a few years and learned a lot thanks to it, but none of it was based on any research—just people like Beck, Uncle Bob, Fowler, etc. distilling their experience into blog posts or books. The downside of that is that it would ignite furious debate that would go nowhere because there was no data to back it up, just anecdotes. These debates, I think, turned a lot of people off, even though there were gems of wisdom there.
Yeah I agree, there are definitely people who do this automatically. Well, it’s probably more like a spectrum. Some people do it a lot by default, some a medium amount, some a little. One of the claims I’m making is that that the spectrum leans too much towards “too little”.
Haha right, those debates can definitely tend to devolve and be unproductive. It’s a shame.
Attempting to set up a Django install was one of my worst and most frustrating experiences with any software, ever.
I haven’t looked at Django’s code. It might be beautiful—I wouldn’t know. But this goes to the point I made in my other comments on this post: “easy for whom?” is a critical question in such cases.
Some people seem to do this automatically. They notice which things make code harder to work with and avoid them. Occasionally, they notice things that make working with code easier and make sure to include those bits in. I guess that’s how you get beautiful code like redis or Django.
But I’ve never seen any formal approach to this. I’ve gone down the software craftsmanship rabbit hole for a few years and learned a lot thanks to it, but none of it was based on any research—just people like Beck, Uncle Bob, Fowler, etc. distilling their experience into blog posts or books. The downside of that is that it would ignite furious debate that would go nowhere because there was no data to back it up, just anecdotes. These debates, I think, turned a lot of people off, even though there were gems of wisdom there.
Yeah I agree, there are definitely people who do this automatically. Well, it’s probably more like a spectrum. Some people do it a lot by default, some a medium amount, some a little. One of the claims I’m making is that that the spectrum leans too much towards “too little”.
Haha right, those debates can definitely tend to devolve and be unproductive. It’s a shame.
Attempting to set up a Django install was one of my worst and most frustrating experiences with any software, ever.
I haven’t looked at Django’s code. It might be beautiful—I wouldn’t know. But this goes to the point I made in my other comments on this post: “easy for whom?” is a critical question in such cases.