this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2024
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[–] Magister@lemmy.world 27 points 1 month ago (15 children)

I'm a programmer since the 80s, who is this guy?

[–] olafurp@lemmy.world 29 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (10 children)

He wrote for example the books Clean Code and Clean Architecture which are IMO opinion really good books although I don't agree with every point he makes.

Some really good points he makes are for example:

  • Functions that only do one job
  • Testing makes refactoring easier
  • The standard SOLID OOP stuff.
  • Tech debt is bad
  • Abstraction and encapsulation is good and allows developers to interact with the code on a higher level in terms of actions instead of writing verbose stuff. Essentially saying less code leads to less bugs
  • Insulate yourself from change
  • Duplication is bad
  • Two use cases that are very similar is not duplication and common code shouldn't be factored out.
  • Don't mix high level code with low level.
  • Build solid Entity classes to model the data and their interactions.
  • Don't write multithreaded code if you don't have to.
  • If you have to do your best to write it so they don't share memory.

Those comes with examples. He's a tad bit overly idealistic in my opinion. These books fail to mention a couple of things:

  • Refactoring is expensive and the cost is often not justified.
  • Premature abstraction is the absolute devil
  • You don't need to insulate from things that are very unlikely to change (like going from SQL to Document DB)
  • Less changes also lead to less bugs.
  • Too much emphasis on functions being few lines of code instead of just being simple.

All in all though, very solid books. I read Clean Code in university and Clean Architecture in my first job and it really helped me wrap my head around different ways to solve the same problem. Excellent ideas but it's not the holy truth. The only reason I remember all of these points is that I encountered all of them on the job and saw the benefit.

In my opinion new programmers should read it and take inspiration. Craftsman level developers should criticise and maybe pick up a few brain concepts to sort some concepts out in their brain. Experts will get little benefit though.

[–] Waldowal@lemmy.world 27 points 1 month ago (3 children)

The consultancy I used to work for in the late 90s would have crucified any developer that didn't write "a data abstraction layer that allows you to pop off the original db and substitute a different one later".

How many times in my 25 year career have I swapped out the database (and been thankful for such an abstraction layer)? 0 times.

[–] Tja@programming.dev 10 points 1 month ago

In my 15 year career? Dozens. Maybe low hundreds. Depends what you work on. Oracle is not making any friends lately and a ton of companies a whole-sale migrating to Postgres, MongoDB, DynamoDB or some of the NewSQL contenders. It's like 50% of the projects I'm involved in. Results are generally positive, with some spectacular wins (x3000 acceleration or x1000 lower costs) and a few losses.

[–] evatronic@lemm.ee 5 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I am literally in the middle of swapping DynamoDB for a RDBMS.

The idea that you can abstract away such fundamentally different data stores is silly. While I hate doing it now, reworking the code to use relational models properly makes for a better product later.

[–] Tja@programming.dev 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It's literally what an orm does, and it's good enough for 80% of apps out there. Using it for the wrong purpose is what's silly.

[–] evatronic@lemm.ee 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

I see. It seems like you may be one of the people that try to coerce relational models into nosql stores like Dynamo.

Or course it's possible. They even trick you into thinking it's a good pattern by naming things "tables".

But if you're using Dynamo to its fullest an ORM is not going to be able to replicate that into a relational store without some fundamental changes.

[–] Tja@programming.dev 1 points 1 month ago

Hence 80%.

Most apps out there are a CRUD with a thin layer of logic.

If you are in the 20% that needs real performance, an ORM is not gonna cut it, no matter what DB you have.

[–] olafurp@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

I'm going to suggest not using an ORM. I used three so far and it really likes to tell you what you can and can't do when query builders can do the same thing by creating the SQL string for you. SQL is also very nice and easy (just parameterise all inputs to avoid the SQL injection)

[–] prof@infosec.pub 2 points 1 month ago

While he advocates for it, that's also a point that Martin brings up multiple times when he talks about his project "fitnesse".

Basically saying that they left it open how stuff can be saved, but the need has never arisen to actually pivot to a different system.

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