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54 points tudorizer | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.407s | source
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oytis ◴[] No.44367106[source]
I don't get his argument, and if it wasn't Martin Fowler I would just dismiss it. He admits himself that it's not an abstraction over previous activity as it was with HLLs, but rather a new activity altogether - that is prompting LLMs for non-deterministic outputs.

Even if we assume there is value in it, why should it replace (even if in part) the previous activity of reliably making computers do exactly what we want?

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kookamamie ◴[] No.44403847[source]
Funny, I dismiss the opinion based on the author in question.
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Insanity ◴[] No.44403918[source]
Serious question - why? I know of the author but don’t see a reason to value his opinion on this topic more or less because of this.

(Attaching too much value to the person instead of the argument is more of an ‘argument from authority’)

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kookamamie ◴[] No.44404170[source]
Let's just say I think a lot of damage was caused by their OOP evangelism back in the day.
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diggan ◴[] No.44404432[source]
You don't think the damage was done by the people who religiously follow whatever loudmouths says? Those are the people I'd stop listening to, rather than ignoring what an educator says when sharing their perspective.

Don't get me wrong, I feel like Fowler is wrong about some things too, and wouldn't follow what he says as dogma, but I don't think I'd attribute companies going after the latest fad as his fault.

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1. kookamamie ◴[] No.44404971[source]
Perhaps. Then again, advocating things like Singleton as anything beyond a gloriefied global variable is pretty high on my BS list.

An example: https://martinfowler.com/bliki/StaticSubstitution.html

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2. diggan ◴[] No.44405576[source]
> gloriefied global variable is pretty high on my BS list

Say you have a test that is asserting the output of some code, and that code is using a global variable of some kind, how do you ensure you can have tests that are using different values for that global variable and it all works? You'd need to be able to change it during tests somehow.

Personally, I think a lot of the annoying parts of programming go away when you use a more expressive language (like Clojure), including this one. But for other languages, you might need to work around the limitations of the language and then approaches like using Singletons might make more sense.

At the same time, Fowlers perspective is pretty much always in the context of "I have this piece of already written code I need to make slightly better", obviously the easy way is to not have global variables in the first place, but when working with legacy code you do stumble upon one or three non-optimal conditions.