Post AW8A8KhJKowYmlp1k0 by jeffcliff@shitposter.club
(DIR) More posts by jeffcliff@shitposter.club
(DIR) Post #AW6XPDtbmm6BF8g2zY by jasongorman@mastodon.cloud
2023-05-25T11:17:35Z
2 likes, 1 repeats
@daedalus The person to speak to is Robert C. Martin. It's from Clean Code. I've personally recorded programming sessions (not just mine) and noticed just how much time nothing happens on the screen during "coding" sessions. Various sources (e.g., The Mythical Man- Month, and this one https://blog.ndepend.com/mythical-man-month-10-lines-per-developer-day/) estimate average dev lines of code per day at between 10 - 100. Let's call it 55 LOC/day. Average words in a LOC: ~5. 275 words per day. At 30 wpm, < 10 mins of typing code/day.
(DIR) Post #AW6XPGKcjItenVKeNU by jasongorman@mastodon.cloud
2023-05-25T11:20:17Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@daedalus And that's assuming that developers aren't looking at code while they're typing it :-)
(DIR) Post #AW6XTkknYx16JBiTlw by jasongorman@mastodon.cloud
2023-05-24T10:37:24Z
2 likes, 3 repeats
We spend roughly 10x as much time reading code as we do writing it. A tool or technique that makes you twice as "productive" at writing code *at best* makes you 5% more productive over all. Making your code easier to understand will have 10x the impact. But that doesn't sell tools or put developers out of work, so you won't be reading about it in Forbes.
(DIR) Post #AW6XTnKJzqcWHwLsQ4 by jasongorman@mastodon.cloud
2023-05-24T11:01:48Z
2 likes, 0 repeats
"But Jason, we can get ChatGPT to explain the code to us". Oh really?
(DIR) Post #AW6Xhu8BUlozRgP2Tw by guusdk@toot.igniterealtime.org
2023-05-26T11:45:22Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@jasongorman "We spend roughly 10x as much time reading code as we do writing it."Interesting! Is that based on empirical data? I had not looked at it this way.
(DIR) Post #AW6Xhv1q9qLCEIRUES by aesthetikx@ruby.social
2023-05-26T15:17:51Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@guusdk @jasongorman I was going to ask the same thing. I'm really not sure this is true, it certainly doesn't "feel" true, unless you count reading the code you are actively writing. Certainly this depends on the kind of project.
(DIR) Post #AW6Xhw06XmXxFCdcAK by jasongorman@mastodon.cloud
2023-05-26T16:26:50Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@aesthetikx @guusdk Record yourself "coding" for a day on a production system
(DIR) Post #AW6XloVyJodpBXOS9o by leeg@fosstodon.org
2023-05-26T15:53:34Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@jasongorman there's some maths missing here. If I double my writing rate then I double the amount I have to read, so I become 90% worse overall not 5% better.
(DIR) Post #AW6XvmDZiF88xRXUHY by lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me
2023-05-28T05:58:00.229990Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@leeg @jasongorman Kind of logic and revelation which reminds me of the various explainations about why you should avoid writing clever code, for example:>Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it. — Brian W. Kernighan and P. J. Plauger in The Elements of Programming Style.
(DIR) Post #AW8A8KhJKowYmlp1k0 by jeffcliff@shitposter.club
2023-05-29T00:41:14.302638Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
i would argue that this is only true if you are the only one who uses the codefor free software you can easily have millions or billions of usersand every one of them should be able to read and understand the code in principle, so code that makes you twice as productive at writing code at makes us, as a group ~0.00000001% more productive overall. Making your code easier to understand will have 1,000,000x or more the impact.
(DIR) Post #AW8ABH7V5o2AYhTVpY by jasongorman@mastodon.cloud
2023-05-24T11:13:51Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@thirstybear That's the thing: if it doesn't have the information, it can't generate an explanation. It excels at explaining code that's easy to understand. The real selling point is brownie points for comments. Like at university.
(DIR) Post #AW8AC8l1fa8sudNKIS by yacc143@mastodon.social
2023-05-26T13:24:38Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@jasongorman Ok, repeat slowly after me:LLM DO NOT UNDERSTAND ANYTHING.LLM predict (based on their training data) what's the most likely next token, that would also happen in the training data.(Yes you can express what ChatGPT does in formal Statistics formula, but then somehow about 98% of humanity runs crying for help when you show them.)
(DIR) Post #AW8AC9Zid6gxRr5oJM by jasongorman@mastodon.cloud
2023-05-26T13:40:17Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@yacc143 Yes, I know :-) https://youtu.be/_nG6d6HSGB4
(DIR) Post #AW8ADE83BVMzrRf9zE by thirstybear@agilodon.social
2023-05-24T11:12:41Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@jasongorman Obviously ChatGPT is a master of stating the bleedin’ obvious.
(DIR) Post #AW8AEQR4ugYmJt8Ov2 by sabik@rants.au
2023-05-26T08:08:27Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@jasongorman @daedalus Lot less than 55 LoC/day if you go by COCOMO(I think COCOMO works out to something like 10-20 LoC/day? It's been a while since I last played with the formulas...)
(DIR) Post #AW8AFPZhbEhfwIdeKW by BenjaminHimes@struct.bio
2023-05-24T21:43:12Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@jasongorman i personally spend 95% of my time shouting and shaking my fist at code
(DIR) Post #AW8Dn5EM2sOQYDOuzA by pjbrunet@noagendasocial.com
2023-05-29T01:22:14Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@jasongorman Also LLMs write predictable code. That's the opposite of innovation. You're better off in Stack Exchange building your resume.