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Software development topics I've changed my mind on

(chriskiehl.com)
873 points belter | 2 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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1. default-kramer ◴[05 Feb 25 23:47 UTC] No.42957059[source]▶
Hard disagree on the 10kloc limit. At a previous job, I maintained and enhanced a 50kloc monolith (written by someone else), usually by myself. My productivity was very high. At my current job, we've split a codebase that should be about 50kloc into more than 10 separate repositories; everything is still just as coupled but it's much harder to reason about and refactor. My productivity is much lower.
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2. thot_experiment ◴[06 Feb 25 15:01 UTC] No.42962994[source]▶
Agree, people underestimate the cost of interfaces that don't sit exactly where they need to sit (which is almost always the case)

http://number-none.com/blow/john_carmack_on_inlined_code.htm...