Just Funnin’ – the infamous “Cowboys” section of the Lucid book | Hacker News Reader

Just Funnin’ – the infamous “Cowboys” section of the Lucid book

billwadge.wordpress.com

46 pointsherodotus10 comments

I'd seriously recommend having a read through the author's blog in general - I've fallen down that rabbit hole tonight and have been really enjoying his discussions about the Lucid dataflow language and implementations thereof.

The problem is that people to this day are still looking for the One True Solution. But that's a lot like looking for the One True Car. Motor vehicles have to perform in many different conditions, and these conditions greatly affect how different kinds of cars will perform. You wouldn't send a sedan over a logging road in Winter. You wouldn't race a Jeep in the F1. You wouldn't drive a Cobra in Vancouver 9 months of the year (when it's raining). You wouldn't haul a ton of gravel in a Civic.

The cowboys, the wizards, the preachers, the boffins... They all have valid points covering different aspects of the problems we have to solve in the real world. They all have their place, and the pragmatic engineer evaluates them without prejudice in order to find a reasonably good solution to the problem at hand while keeping things decently clean (or cleanable) for the future.

Like in everything else, there are best practices, and these best practices evolve over time because it's a complicated subject that none of the competing schools of thought have mastered completely within their domain.

I for one celebrate the cross-pollination.

Cars are much easier to replace than languages though. You can buy a new car and use it straight away.

To use a new language you must change your brain.

While the text here doesn't strike me as too egregious, compared to some that I've encountered, I admit that I hate it when technical book authors attempt a folksy, light-hearted, jokey style. Why? Perhaps I'm just a curmudgeon and grouchy old git, but most technical book humour comes across, to me, as puerile, stale, and flat. Case in point? The Little Schemer. I really wanted to like this book, but the insufferably twee cartoons and food-related jokes just annoyed me to the point where I just couldn't go on with it. Remember "This space reserved for jelly stains"? Why? Why would you, as someone trying to explain a difficult technical subject, write something like that? So this book has been thrown in the "sell" pile, as I'll not bother with it again.

The best technical books I've read all have a style that could be called plain, unadorned, and direct. And I believe they're much the better for it.

why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby is a delight to read.

The "schemer" books have pretty much the highest code-to-text ratio of any technical book ever written, so it seems strange to me to complain that they have too many jokes as filler.

Indeed. Those books don't have much fluff. Most of it exists at the intro and outro to chapters. I think it's important to consider how they are meant to be used. More than many other books, the Schemer books come across as a dialog with the reader, not just a block of text to read and incorporate (somehow) into your mind. (Of course, this is deliberate and discussed in the books themselves.)

Things like the "space reserved for jelly stains" are meant as break points for readers. It's not intended (unless you're already advanced to the point the book has little new to tell you) for readers to go straight through. Just like we don't take college course lectures and run through them in a week (16 weeks, 3 hours/week, 48 total hours, approximately).

Doing that would be overwhelming, just like reading one of these books straight through. And it eliminates the time needed to let information and ideas properly integrate into your mind. It's the difference between a cram course and a chance to actually learn.

In most cases I'd agree but an excellent example of how it can work is in Expert C Programming: Deep C Secrets By Peter van der Linden. It manages to be both technically dense and hilarious, the tongue in cheek style does well to contrast the fairly mundane subject matter.

This is good for you - but there are people out there who have a different learning style and maybe there's a place for those texts to help them?

I'm fine with adding a little humor and levity in a technical book, but only if the following conditions are met:

1. Provides some pedagogic purpose (such as illustrating a point)

2. It's actually funny

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