robinm @ robinm @programming.dev

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2 yr. ago

I never had to use this estimate in front of a client, but if I had, I would decompose it first before giving the total estimate. If there is about 10 items to do per button, so 10 buttons would be a hundred complexe tasks. So let say that it take an hour per task, but since we are fast we can do 10 a day. So suddenly 10 working days, or said otherwise 2 weeks don't seems unrealistics for this apparently simple 10 buttons task.

As a rough estimation, if you include everything (apperance, discussion, functionality, interaction with other controls, …) I would say that every single input field or button is about a day of work. And then you start to realise how many buttons there is in any GUI and how much it will cost.

Usually when people say “I suck at maths”, it means that they are bad at doing manual calculus. Maths is extremely useful in programming, but it’s absolutely not the same kind of math. I don’t think that the grade you had in math at school will influence in any if you will be good or bad in programming.

There take on what they call capabitilites is very interesting. Basically anything that would make a function non-pure seems to be declared explicitely.

A computational effect or an "effectful" computation is one which relies on or changes elements that are outside of its immediate environment. Some examples of effectful actions that a function might take are:

• writing to a database
• throwing an exception
• making a network call
• getting a random number
• altering a global variable

If you try to learn git one command at a time on the fly, git is HARD. If you take the time to understand its internal data structure it's much, much easier to learn. Unfortunalely most people try to do the former because it works well (or better) for most tasks.

I can't recommand enough the git parable.

I am always doubtful when people say that accessing information inside git is hard. I totally agree that defaults in git can be improved (and they are, git restore and git switch are a much better alternative to git checkout that I no longer use). So let’s review the section “A Few Reasons Why SQLite Does Not Use Git”:

“Git does not provide good situational awareness”

git log --graph --oneline --author-date-order --since=1week

Make it an alias if you use it often. Alias is what helps you create your own good default (until everyone uses the same alias and in that case it should be part of the base set of commands).

“Git makes it difficult to find successors (descendants) of a check-in”

git log --graph --oneline --all --ancestry-path ${commit}~..

Likewise you could consider making it an alias if you use it often. Aliases can also be used as a post-it to help you remember what are the command that you find useful but you only use once in a blue moon!

The mental model for Git is needlessly complex

I may agree about that one. For reference, this is what the article says:

A user of Git needs to keep all of the following in mind: The working directory The "index" or staging area The local head The local copy of the remote head The actual remote head

If git fetch was run automatically every so often, as well as git push (of course in a personal branch), then this model could be simplified as

• the working directory
• the “index” or staging area (I actually think that being able to have more than one for drafting multiples commit at once, like a fix and a feature at the same time would be better than only having a single index)
• your working copy of the shared branch
• the shared branch

And integrating your changes (merging/rebasing) should probably be exclusively done using a PR-like mechanism.

Git does not track historical branch names

I’m skeptical about the usefulness of this. But since git was my first real vcs (10 years ago), it may just be that I have not used a workflow that took advantaged of persistant branches. I assume that git annotate could be a solution here.

Git requires more administrative support

most developers use a third-party service such as GitHub or GitLab, and thus introduce additional dependencies.

That’s absolutely true but I’m not sure it’s a real issue. Given how many strategies there are for CI/CD (and none is the definitive winner yet) I do think that being able to select the right option for you/your team/your org is probably a good idea.

Git provides a poor user experience

https://xkcd.com/1597/

I highly disagree about that xkcd comics. Git is compatible will all workflows so you have to use a subset of all the commands. Of course you will have more commands that you never use if a software is usable for all the workflow that you don’t use. But you need about 15 commands to do stuff, 30 to be fluent, and some more to be able to help anyone. Compared to any other complex software that I use I really don’t think that it’s an unreasonably high count. That being said I totally agree that git from 10+ years ago was more complex and we should correctly teach what is needed to junior. HTML/css/js is a nightmare of complexity but it doesn’t stop 15 years old kid with no mentoring to build cool stuff because you don’t need to know everything to be able to do most of the things you may think of, just a good minimal set of tools. And people should definitively take the time to learn git, and stop using outdated guide. Anything that don’t use git switch, git restore and git rebase --interactive and presents you have to inspect the history in length (git log --graph or any graphical interface that show the history in a graph, git show, and more generally than you can filter the history in any way you want, being by author, date, folder, file type, …) is definitively not a good guide.

To sum-up, I think that from this presentation fossil seems more opinionated than git which means that it will be simpler as long as your workflow exactly matches the expected workflow whereas using git requires to curate its list of commands to select only the one useful for yours.

That's an interesting idea, but as someone else pointed using a voice modulator would be much better. Technical skills are importants, but human behaviors too. I would not trade a nice average coworker for someone who is better technically but doesn't know how to communicate. And typing is complementary, not a replacement for voice communication since the amont of information you can share in a minute is 3-5 times higher by voice.

What do you mean by that?

You seems to have a severe issue so I'm not sure what I'm going to say may help.

Learning something and then forgeting it is absolutely normal. Repetition over and exponentially long time and sleep in between helps a lot. Some people use flashcards to helps with memorisation. The idea is simple, when you learn something you write question + answers on a piece on paper (usually bristol for easy manipulation) and put it in a box. This box has multiple compartment: every day, every second day, once a week, once every second week, once every second month for example. When you add a card you add it to the “every day” compartment. Then each day you open all the compartment of the current day and ask yourself all the questions. If you correctly remember the answer you put it in the next compartment, and if you don't you put it back to the “every day” one.

Another way to helps you understand and rembembering things is to explain them to others. If you don't have someone to explain what you just learn you can create youtube video (even if noone will watch them but you do as if you had an audience). As bonus you now have a video that explains using your language something you just learn if you ever forget it!

Moving to git is nice but I don't understand why they don't self-host a gitlab instance.

step 1: learn to comment everything. This will helps code reviewer to catch errors because your code doesn’t match the comments

step 2: write your code in a way that makes comments useless and stop writting them

step 3: write your code just like you did in step 2, but documents all the things that you didn’t do, or why the code is more complicated than the naive approach. If your arguments are weak you are not in step 3, but in step 1.

It's especially true when you want to parse some json/xml/whatever. Just describe your datastuctures with regular struct and enum, add serde and done! It's like magic!

Would encoding images in oklch before compressing them using jppeg or whatever is used for video compression helps to have much better dark while still keeping current compression ratio?

Syntax has never really be an issue. The closest thing to plain english programming are legal documents and contracts. As you can see they are horrible to understand but that the only way to correctly specify exactly what you want. And code is much better at it. Another datapoint are visual languages like lego mindstorm or LabView. It's quite easy to do basic things, but it doesn't scale at all.

This new OKLCH color space looks really nice to use. It's surprising that it's really human readable, I wouldn't have guessed that you could do it for random colors.

I'm a bit surprised. Why does OKLAB gradiant looks better than OKLCH?

I can totally understand the iterating speed due to higher cognitive load of a statically typed language, and non instant compilation.

However I am very surprised about your refactoring experience. For me Rust is at least in a league of its own. In python/js I am terrified that I could break some unknown parts of my code whenever I touch anything. In C++ I fear that I just broke an invariants and made something UB. In all those languages, I expect regressions when I'm refactoring. But in Rust, even for large scale architecture changes if it compiles I'm quite certain that it's going to be easy to validate and often works the first try. What point points do you enconter that make your experience sub-optimal ?

I need to re-try it. I really like like lsp/dsp are first class cityzen, including the keybindings, and that there is better text objects than in vanilla neovim. Last time I tried it there was a few things that where not that easy to set-up (I forget what), but I should definitively take the time to learn it.

I just wish that neovim/kakoune/helix had a marketplace just like vscode. It make the discovery and installation so much easier when everyone use the same tools.

I do understant why old unicode versions re-used “i” and “I” for turkish lowercase dotted i and turkish uppercase dotless I, but I don't understand why more recent version have not introduce two new characters that looks exactly the same but who don't require locale-dependant knowlege to do something as basic as “to lowercase”.

That's true. But at least you will have evidence that Martin doesn't conform to the team rules.

One way to make it obvious which function can be called at which state is to use different type. Like UnbackedPizza and CookedPizza, and the bake function takes the former and returns the later.