Comment by dannyw
4 years ago
To me it's an means to an end. I don't care if my solution takes 100ms instead of 1ms, it's the superior choice for me if it takes me 1 minute to do it instead of 10 minutes to learn something new.
4 years ago
To me it's an means to an end. I don't care if my solution takes 100ms instead of 1ms, it's the superior choice for me if it takes me 1 minute to do it instead of 10 minutes to learn something new.
True, but sometimes these 10 minutes help you to discover something new that will improve your code.
I had a few of these cases in my life:
- discovering optimized patterns in Perl, which led to code I could not understand the next day
- discovering decorators in Python, which led to better code
- discovering comprehensions in Python (a magical thing) that led to better code, except when I wanted to be too clever and ended up with Perl-like code
The flaw of human nature on display. And I don't mean that personal, not to you anyway, but to the human species.
Why? It seems very rational. Especially if you're just going to run it once to get a value and not as a part of some system.
Exactly, that's not a flaw, that's rational behaviour. Why design an intricate solution for a one-off. Using 15 times the amount of time it would have taken you manually to automate a pretty standard task is just stupid, though we all do it.
Do the first thing that works, don't overthink it.
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If that was a fair comment then we’d be writing all our code in assembly still.