[HN Gopher] Semantic Compression (2014)
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       Semantic Compression (2014)
        
       Author : tosh
       Score  : 42 points
       Date   : 2025-12-07 16:55 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (caseymuratori.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (caseymuratori.com)
        
       | thefourthchime wrote:
       | This is exactly how I write code. I never engineer anything until
       | I have to. I don't try to get rid of code duplication until it
       | works. And I try to be as "least clever" as possible.
        
         | gdulli wrote:
         | I'm the same way. Underengineering is so much easier to fix
         | than overengineering.
        
       | imron wrote:
       | One of my favorite articles of all time.
       | 
       | It helped crystallize a number of concepts I understood but
       | hadn't been able to fully realize in the face of the prevailing
       | OOP trends of the time.
       | 
       | It was the permission I needed to buck those trends.
        
       | moribunda wrote:
       | Well, one might think it's not hard to predict that you will have
       | to use buttons in the game editor more than once...
        
       | lijok wrote:
       | Not trying to praise OOP at all here but notice a couple of
       | things;
       | 
       | - You're not dealing with persistence. No DB, no migration
       | headaches, no downtime requirements, etc. Constraints entirely
       | devoid of business requirements. - You still arrived at the same
       | level of indirection you belabored. - You worked off of an
       | established project that didn't go off on any tangents. Building
       | bottom up, depending on how much foresight you have, easily leads
       | to the kind of mess that you cannot semantically compress without
       | rewriting from scratch. In many cases, especially if working on
       | projects with multiple people, those reusable patterns will be
       | incredibly difficult to spot due to the mess surrounding the
       | implementations.
       | 
       | You're definitely on the right track, but for one it's not an xor
       | choice which approach you take (semantic compression or OOP),
       | secondly, semantic compression is not as simple as it was made
       | out here to be, and lastly, businesses do not build bottom up.
        
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