Kernighan's Lever (2012)

Reactive programming was my object lesson here. Years ago I had a very brief love affair with .NET's Reactive Extensions Framework for a streaming data intake pipeline for a BI system. It made writing the data transformation code so quick and easy!

That all evaporated within a month of initial release, when I had to diagnose my first production defect. It turns out that usable call stacks are a very nice thing to have in your exception reports! I could already see that, in the long run, this design was going to cost us more to maintain than it saved us in initial development costs. Soon after, the team and I agreed to revert to doing it the crufty old boring way, and we were ultimately glad we did.

I've subsequently had similar experiences with other "easy button" compute frameworks, IoC containers, etc. They were all high quality pieces of software that did a good job of doing what they do, and possibly did save on initial development costs. But when the beeper wakes you up at 3AM, nothing beats a readable call stack that corresponds very closely to the lexical structure of the code.

The moral of the story for me has been that it's always good to experiment with clever tools techniques. But you should also remember that you have the option to thank them for the learning experience they provided while choosing to put something unsexy into production.

Hm, what the post's author says is reasonable on its own, but I'm confident Kernighan's intents were really about avoiding clever code when simple, dumb code does the job. Or, as Rob Pike[0] puts it:

> Rule 3. Fancy algorithms are slow when n is small, and n is usually small. Fancy algorithms have big constants. Until you know that n is frequently going to be big, don't get fancy. (Even if n does get big, use Rule 2 first.)

> Rule 4. Fancy algorithms are buggier than simple ones, and they're much harder to implement. Use simple algorithms as well as simple data structures.

It's a bit ironic then for this post to rely on such a convoluted interpretation instead of the simple, dumb one.

[0]: https://users.ece.utexas.edu/~adnan/pike.html

This is a great piece.

> ... since you are confident that you understand how the code works, having written it yourself, you feel that you must be able to figure out what is going on. ... Suddenly you see it, and you're blinded by a bright light as all the pieces fall into place.

There's a particular frame of mind like 'I feel that there's a bug in this specific bit of code'. I often find that once I make that shift it's suddenly easy to see the bug. I have tried to cultivate this feeling, but it's not easy to suddenly conjure up. A bit like flow state.

The article first talks about the benefits of sophisticated code, you can grow while debugging it. Further on the concept of flow is explained.

Somehow there is a mismatch.

In the graph depicting flow, you see that you achieve best results flow- (and as a bonus, grow-) wise, when you take up challenges slightly harder than according your comfort zone.

The mismatch is that debugging is quite a large notch harder than implementing. There might be a race condition, or you understood a used API differently from how it was implemented. Or some FPGA's software registers are poorly documented. So you spend a lot of time in the frustration/imposter syndrome zone, as opposed to the comforty growing, flow zone.

The effect is much more explicit when the code or design is not from your own hand. You first need to understand other people's clever tricks or paradigms and find the holes in the reasoning or even worse, in the several half baked refactorings that happened afterwards.

> Debugging is twice as hard...

Not an axiom I would agree with, and I find it strange the rest of the article builds on this assumption.

I'm always frustrated coding and debugging cause i'm next level :

(seriously though, liked the read and it makes me feel a bit more sane when i struggle to debug my own code! kind of feels weird that can happen but this puts a positive twist on it which i feel is likely quite true :))

It assumes that "Skill" is a 1d value. But the ability to write quality code and the ability to debug are a bit orthogonal.

Being better at debugging doesn't necessarily makes you better at writing less complex, more approachable code. Though debugging should teach you which patterns cause bugs or impede debugging.

And what do you do once you are so skilled your software doesn't have bugs? :P

Regarding self improvement, Aaron Swartz put it better here: https://web.archive.org/web/20240928215405/http://www.aarons... (tldr: do things you don't like)