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   raganwald 🍓 (raganwald@social.bau-ha.us)'s status on Thursday, 14-Nov-2024 00:08:36 JST raganwald 🍓

   "Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it."—Dr. Alan J. Perlis, "Perlisisms: Epigrams in Programming" (1982)

   A long time ago, I created .andand, a kind of Elvis operator for Ruby. It solved the problem of trying to invoke methods on objects that were `nil`, especially when chaining methods.

   But I wasn't a genius removing the complexity of variables that might be objects, or might be nil. I was suffering it and trying to manage my suffering.

   👇🏽

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     raganwald 🍓 (raganwald@social.bau-ha.us)'s status on Thursday, 14-Nov-2024 00:08:32 JST raganwald 🍓

     in reply to

     p.s. The above observation explains what I like about TypeScript, hated about Java, and liked about C++ "back in the day."

     A good type system is a tool we can use to manage things like "what is the set of legal values for this parameter," or, "who can and who cannot modify this object."

     You _can_ just document the types to get the compiler to compile. But you can also refactor them to remove complexity. That is a powerful argument for not just using types, but embracing type-first thinking.

     👇🏽

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     raganwald 🍓 (raganwald@social.bau-ha.us)'s status on Thursday, 14-Nov-2024 00:08:34 JST raganwald 🍓

     in reply to

     The "genius" move is to architect your code in such a way that the number of places where a variable might be nil is extremely low. The "genius" move is to consider using patterns like "null object" if you really do need to be explicit about something not being real.

     So much of programming is like this: We build up libraries of patterns to manage and sanitize problems rather than lifting our point of view and removing the problems.

     👇🏽

     esmevane, sorry repeated this.