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Software development topics I've changed my mind on

(chriskiehl.com)
873 points belter | 1 comments | 05 Feb 25 09:50 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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Kototama ◴[05 Feb 25 11:24 UTC] No.42947000[source]▶
> Typed languages are essential on teams with mixed experience levels

I like this one because it puts this endless dilemma in a human context. Most discussions are technical (static typing ease refactoring and safety, dynamic typing is easier to learn and better for interactive programming etc.) and ignore the users, the programmers.

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wesselbindt ◴[05 Feb 25 13:53 UTC] No.42948492[source]▶
I'm kind of wondering where the "mixed experience levels" part comes from. What is it about more homogeneously skilled teams that makes them less susceptible to the productivity boost that statically typed languages give in large code bases?
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whstl ◴[05 Feb 25 15:22 UTC] No.42949734[source]▶
IMO it's like scrum: if your team is good and homogeneous, it doesn't really matter much what you do: it just works. Scrum and no scrum, types and no types. It's not about having rockstars or 10x engineers, it's just about having shorthands, shared knowledge, etc.

If your team is varied or too large, you need things to help you out with organisation and communication.

(Whether my examples of Scrum and Types are the answer: depends on the team unfortunately)

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bluGill ◴[05 Feb 25 15:53 UTC] No.42950282[source]▶
In my experience: Too large is any team larger than 10 people or any code base with more than 10,000 lines of code. Both of those would be considered tiny by most in the industry.
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whstl ◴[05 Feb 25 16:12 UTC] No.42950602[source]▶
Oh, you are definitely correct about 10 people being too many. For me I think the magic number was 4 or 5.

About 10k lines, I really never stopped to think but I'm gonna guess you're correct on that too.

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1. bluGill ◴[05 Feb 25 16:42 UTC] No.42951139[source]▶
The numbers I gave are not exact. Depending on details that I don't think anyone entirely knows. Sometime 1 person is too many (generally implying a bad programmer), while other times you can get a bit over 10 if you have strong discipline. Likewise strong discipline can get you to 100k lines. Really what this is about is how much pain you are willing to put up with. 10 people and 10k lines of code are good round numbers to work with.