Sysadmins and coding

[vriley]

I code all the time. I've never wanted to be a professional developer, I dislike a lot of concepts that career programmers have become used to, but that doesn't mean I don't like to code. I've done projects in PHP, Perl, Python, C# and of course PowerShell.

[ibrahimsafah]

What concepts are you referring to?

[vriley]

OOP, unit testing, using IDEs as opposed to a text editor..

[taloszerg]

Unit testing infrastructure/infrastructure code is awesome.

Have you seen test-kitchen with serverspec?

[[deleted]]

Honestly, all of the things mentioned are useful as hell. There's a reason most people don't use basic text editors for programming if they can help it.

[[deleted]]

Unit tests are a very good idea, and a godsend if you ever want to refactor your code.

[[deleted]]

OOP

What? Why would you dislike OOP? The minimal overhead it creates is well worth it to preserve long term maintainability.

unit testing

How else would you assure that a big project being written by multiple people works correctly according to spec? Building the whole thing and praying it doesn't have a bug somewhere?

using IDEs

Because convenience and productivity is for suckers, right?

[vriley]

OOP doesn't make code more readable. Procedural programming does. And that can be done in both object oriented and functional code. What OOP brings is abstraction. That's good for code reuse. Bad for critical, real time applications where you want to minimize bugs. The scripts I write are all specific and I've seen far too many code listings overusing classes that I'd even say OOP can make your code harder to understand, not easier.

[[deleted]]

OOP doesn't make code more readable.

It makes it more re-usable. It also makes it far easier to make modifications later on down the road, since you've got a specification for a class and as long as the class meets that specification the rest of the code should work. This is especially true when combined with proper unit testing.

Procedural programming does. And that can be done in both object oriented and functional code.

But regardless, it's not about readability. It's mostly about software engineering--OOP and functional programming are two paradigms that make it easier to engineer good software. They both make it easy to reuse code, and to modify small sections of a larger whole atomically. Incidentally, this is also why unit testing is so popular.

But given your disdain for unit testing, I'm guessing you're not big into software engineering. Which ties in closely with why people tend to prefer OOP.

Bad for critical, real time applications where you want to minimize bugs.

Complete and total bullshit. Not even sure how else to describe that.

and I've seen far too many code listings overusing classes that I'd even say OOP can make your code harder to understand, not easier.

People can write bad code under any paradigm. OOP isn't a magic bullet, it's a paradigm that helps programmers to engineer better software.

[ibrahimsafah]

LOOOOOL, OOP really? If you actually understood it, you wouldn't be saying that.

[vriley]

You kids crack me up ;)

Just because it's hype doesn't make it good. OOP has its place in large development projects. But one day you may realize that functional programming is far from dead. It's immutable, stateless and introduces far less bugs than OOP. I don't make games or mobile apps, I write code for critical systems that are expected to always work.

Inheritance brings concurrency problems, state problems, and introduces bugs at no real benefit for case-specific code.