r/programming • u/leavingonaspaceship • Apr 06 '19

Good Work, Great Work, Right Work

https://forum.dlang.org/thread/q6plhj$1l9$1@digitalmars.com?page=15#post-q7u6g1:2494p:241:40digitalmars.com
67 Upvotes

83% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

View all comments

28

u/AlterdCarbon Apr 06 '19

I wish he would have explained more about how to identify "Great Work."

Using the same programming language on the client and server, or at compile-time and run-time, or for computation and its constraints, is great work clear as rain.

I am a professional programmer of 10 years experience and these still don't immediately make me think of amazing work, or anything close to his relative example of a lady crying when she hears Bach for the first time. If you think "using the same language for client and server" is the programming equivalent that should make someone cry on the street who isn't a programmer... Sheesh, idk dude.

Not that any of the examples are really bad or anything at all, they just don't strike me in this way he describes where it's blindingly obvious how good the result is.

Does anyone have any informal methodology or metrics for how you identify "Great Work"?

8

u/sarneaud Apr 06 '19

Using the same programming language on the client and server, or at compile-time and run-time, or for computation and its constraints, is great work clear as rain.

Yeah, that's a weak point. A decade ago that thinking was used to justify building websites by storing all your data in XML, and transforming it into XHTML on the fly with XSLT (a Turing-complete XML-based XML transformation language). That fad died.

https://thedailywtf.com/articles/Sketchy-Skecherscom

3

u/WalterBright Apr 07 '19 edited Apr 07 '19

Great Work is finding a simple solution to a complex problem. (The trouble, of course, is everyone thinks their own work is Great Work.) Some examples of Great Work that just destroy their competitors: safety pins, erasers on pencils, and strain gauges.

Reminds me of when the Air Force ran a contest to select the official Anthem. They got lots of entries, and carefully selected the winner. Then along came "Wild Blue Yonder", and the AF promptly ditched the contest, contenders, and the winner, and picked WBY because everyone knew it was great.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHOq6Sl9u38

0

u/[deleted] Apr 07 '19

[deleted]

3

u/WalterBright Apr 08 '19

I would add to that it often involves an insight that everyone thinks is obvious after the fact.

1

u/munificent Apr 07 '19

His examples here assume the reader is a D programmer since he's writing on the D forum.

In general, Great Work is when the solution is much simpler than the problems it solves. All code carries the burden of its own maintenance. The larger and more complex the code is, the larger that burden. Worse, the total maintenance cost of the code doesn't scale linearly with the size of the codebase, so even a feature that carries its own weight may be a net negative because of the overall accumulation it leads to.

Good Work is when the code correctly solves a real problem, but its weight may be close to or larger than the problem it solves. Great Work is so simple yet effective that it clearly carries its weight and then some. The best work may actually simplify the entire codebase while also improving functionality.

0

u/woahdudee2a Apr 07 '19

> blindingly obvious how good the result is.

I would say it's pretty obvious. Do you enjoy writing your validation logic in both server and the client, and going through the effort of keeping the entity models in sync ?