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Comment by spacemadness | Hacker News Reader

One devious form of bullshit is always using the simplest of examples to prove out an architecture pattern and call it a day. I’ve lost count on how many times I’ve seen patterns with glaring open questions and pitfalls the author avoids. Then the cacophony of likes follow from folks who’re likely very early in their career or hobby and don’t know any better. This is very prevalent on iOS development blogs as authors rush to write their blog posts after every WWDC.

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The fundamental deficiency with our society is that we value talking about X more than performing/implementing X.

This is true for most fields, including programming.

Most teams have folks to do the heavy lifting, and a small percentage of folks who talk about it.

The talkers are considered more valuable than the doers, within the organization or without.

These are our thought leaders, influencers, architects, you name it.

I am not complaining, this is a game we are all playing. It took me far too long to recognize it.

Kind of?

In practice, communication is essential. We expect closed feedback loop in our technological systems. Turns out that systems made of humans also need feedback loops.

So I don't know if communicators are treated as "more valuable". Maybe. But it might be fair to treat to treat systems lacking closed feedback loops as missing value. In some cases, they may be borderline useless.

Point being, a great piece of tech needs [1] someone to demonstrate its value. Especially technologies that require many people to maintain them. That's how we close feedback loops in communities and organizations.

[1] OK. Technology-based performance art or side projects are possible. Just don't be shocked if nobody cares and the die off when original creators trade them for other interests.

> The fundamental deficiency with our society is that we value talking about X more than performing/implementing X.

I am so guilty of this. I spend so much time on here and other platforms just mindlessly consuming and participating in discussions about software engineering, new technology, best practices, etc.. So much so that I basically barely program anymore (except for my job where none of this information is important for irrelevant and complex reasons).

I have ideas and projects I want to work on, but I think my brain has be rewired over my life to the point that I get the sense of reward of finishing something by actually just procrastinating/reading and not working towards whatever goal.

It's like information sugar -- sugars are easiest for the body to convert into energy. The body likes sugar because it can get "what it wants" while expending the least amount of effort. My brain has apparently has implemented the same logic when it comes personal projects.

This resonates a bit too much with me.

Man you wake me up,I have doing the same these day, I'm gonna start working on my projects agaun.

This resonates with me to a great extent.

I believe this is a very old problem, which resurfaces in different forms depending on the individual and the context in which they function. I'm weakly certain that CS Lewis even devoted one of his screwtape letters to exactly this problem, but couched in the context of taking action versus writing about taking action.

But since I can't find the money quote right now, and I'm not entirely sure that it was in the screwtape letters rather than some other Lewis book, here's one that addresses an oblique facet of the same paradox:

"the more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel"

I’ve learned to wait a couple of years for dubdub hype to subside, and “lessons learned” to be shared.

I get tired of the “write an app in five minutes” demos. As someone that regularly works on ship apps, I can report that there is a world of difference between academic demos, and something that can be shipped.

At this point I’d rather see the how to fix it when things go wrong demo. Of course very few tools can show that either because it’s messy or it’s to hard to show all the pieces.

I feel like classic object oriented tutorials talking about fruits and apples with no connection to actual apps you'd build are ones to add to this pile

I may be wrong on this but weren't the fruit analogies originally meant to describe the difference between class based and prototype based languages and then it was extended to actually teach the concepts in a way that didn't work?

I remember my professor using them to try and teach pre-standard C++ and when I pressed him to explain actual use cases I figured out he didn't understand himself.

I have the feeling it was meant as a bridge for lisp programmers moving to class based languages but that may be because we learned lisp first.

Anyways that context is the only place I found value in it.

Coming up with good examples of inheritance is hard. Instead of teaching with bad examples, that should have been a warning that inheritance should be much less commonly used.

>Instead of teaching with bad examples, that should have been a warning that inheritance should be much less commonly used.

This. I think the most of the tech industry would benefit from this lesson. If it's beneficial in your situation, use it, otherwise don't.

90% of programming is linear instructions, one after the other. It's not that complicated.

Coming up with protocol oriented programming was probably one of the bigger disservices Apple has done its developers. There are still people who think everything needs a protocol, or it isn’t soundly structured.

In the same vein, I'd love to see more articles about recursion that don't even mention, let alone demonstrate, solving factorials. There's gotta be something else.

Trees or graphs would be great! Or arbitrarily nested objects. Those things have probably represented 90% of the recursive functions I’ve actually written

Or parsing. One of the most intuitive and elegant real-world uses of recursion. I've been writing an XML parser and everything is recursive. Of course, because XML is fundamentally a recursive data structure, a tree.

Who in their right mind would sincerely reach for a recursion to solve factorials or Fibonacci first?

Even the maths-minded people would write the sequence bottom-up, and stop when it reached their desired T(n); when programming it, they'd ask for a loop-esque construct that they could stop when a condition was reached.

Tree's would be great, and an actual example would be threaded comments in a forum, or just nested lists.

Oh man, who can forget the interview questions back in the nineties. I go to an interview after spending all week writing trading systems in C++ and it’s always “let’s say you are building a car, how would you structure the classes?”

LMAO, I always failed. Good times.

Reading that made me cringe.

I'd make the `Tire` class derive the `SteeringWheel` class, and `Tire::turn()` moves the car while `SteeringWheel::turn()` steers the car.

You forgot `Windshield` as a base fragile.

Tires and steering wheels are the same after all, no need to reinvent the wheel

Actually these are not bad examples per se if what you want is to understand objects oriented concepts, the problem is that for many scenarios OOP is just a bad model for them.

You zeroed in on the core element of bullshitting: trivializing complexity into sound bites, simplest examples.

I've been learning SwiftUI for MacOS to explore the plausibility of a particular idea I had, and I do think there's some truth in this. So far, I've found it best to seek out more robust, somewhat complete examples that use a particular API in a more realistic context, as well as many other discrete tidbits of information wherever they may be found.

In this case, that's the hackingwithswift blog posts, the hackingwithswift youtube tutorials that follow the blog posts, swiftbysundell, and a number of other independent developers that have fairly lengthy but digestible detailed tutorials on specific APIs; using all of it feels a little like the process of getting a fingerprint registered on a new phone, where you get decent coverage and breadth quickly but then fill in the gaps.

However, I don't think this is unique to WWDC or swift or iOS, it's just that those platforms typically demand only the newest versions of iOS or macOS or even unreleased hardware to get much value out of them, so I can't imagine you'd be implementing them any time shortly-thereafter.

https://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/real.programmers.html

> The academics in computer science have gotten into the "structured programming" rut over the past several years. They claim that programs are more easily understood if the programmer uses some special language constructs and techniques. They don't all agree on exactly which constructs, of course, and the example they use to show their particular point of view invariably fit on a single page of some obscure journal or another-- clearly not enough of an example to convince anyone.

So it isn't a new phenomenon.

The devil is always in the details and it's too easy to present a high level intelligent sounding argument that ignores all the important complexity.

I feel you. I dislike when people following VIPER pattern blindly just because they read a few articles on Medium.

What's the point of adding multiple layer of classes if your code is still tightly coupled together.

Uber's "RIBs" come to mind.

Performance benchmark on ORM/framework/whatever is a funny matter on that specific point.

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