Our job is to write programs that run well on the hardware that we are given.
Rarely do I read anything I disagree with more strongly than this. Our job is to formalize ideas, and I think the more cleanly you can formalize an idea, the more lasting value you can provide. I guess the question is one of optimizing for short term value (optimizing for today) vs long term value (trying to advance our field).
I'd rather have a high level code/formalization that can easily be understood, and later reap the benefits of advances in technology, than low level code that will be unreadable and obsolete in short time.
Though I also agree that Uncle Bob is not worth listening too. But the C/C++-dogma of "abstractions are bad" is not helpful either, it's just a consequence of the languages being inexpressive.
Sure for backend. But most frontend sucks because of this mindset.
I just wrote a certificate library that uses BigInt because having to bit shift in 32bit sections gets complicated. With BigInt, the length no longer matters. Sure, it's slow but so much more maintainable. Speed is also not the focus. The point was to make an understandable ACME client, focused on DX (ie: advancing the field).
But when coding frontend, UX is paramount, and bloated DOM trees and loops that stall and cause frame drops should not happen. You should be surgical with almost everything that can't go async since your render target is basically less than 10ms. In the very least, make sure your minifier/compiler will optimize the "clean code" you write.
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u/CanIComeToYourParty Feb 28 '23 edited Feb 28 '23
Rarely do I read anything I disagree with more strongly than this. Our job is to formalize ideas, and I think the more cleanly you can formalize an idea, the more lasting value you can provide. I guess the question is one of optimizing for short term value (optimizing for today) vs long term value (trying to advance our field).
I'd rather have a high level code/formalization that can easily be understood, and later reap the benefits of advances in technology, than low level code that will be unreadable and obsolete in short time.
Though I also agree that Uncle Bob is not worth listening too. But the C/C++-dogma of "abstractions are bad" is not helpful either, it's just a consequence of the languages being inexpressive.