Comment by amelius
16 hours ago
Simplicity is a driver for better abstractions. But now with AI, will we even develop new abstractions?
16 hours ago
Simplicity is a driver for better abstractions. But now with AI, will we even develop new abstractions?
I was in charge of cleaning up a slop codebase by someone who has barely even heard of 'coding' before. Let's just say, it was abstract.
There's different kinds of abstraction. There's abstraction like Jackson Pollock and there's abstraction like what Dijkstra as suggesting: elegance. Which personally made the article a very weird read to me
tbh codebases like that predate AI code generators. I had one job where my predecessor was not a very good developer by modern standards, but he was productive... a dangerous combination.
I also kind of respect it, it bothers me endlessly when everything isn't perfect and this guy just threw caution to the wind. Jokes on me as I'm working for him now. But it's not like anything that predates AI, I couldn't write this type of slop if I tried lol. Zero formatting, linting, or anything. Just straight goulash.