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41 lines
2.0 KiB
41 lines
2.0 KiB
5 years ago
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title = "Things I Learnt The Hard Way - Shortcuts Are nice, But Only In The Short Run"
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date = 2019-07-08
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[taxonomies]
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tags = ["en-au", "books", "things i learnt", "frameworks"]
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A lot of languages/libraries/frameworks add a way to make things shorter,
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reducing the number of things you need to type.
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But, later, that will bite you and you'll have to remove the shortcut and do
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the long things.
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<!-- more -->
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Frameworks and libraries -- and even some languages -- come with "helpers" for
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most boilerplate things. Instead of typing the same 5 lines of code over and
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over, you can use a simple function; instead of writing the function with 5
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parameters, you can skip a bit and use another one with just one. Or you could
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just add a simple macro expansion on top of your struct/class and it would
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complete all the missing points.
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Don't get me wrong, they are great.
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But you must understand what the macro/function is hiding from you. 'Cause
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sooner or later, you'll find a case where it doesn't have a perfect fit and
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you need to change just a small detail. And then you'll start running in
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circles 'cause, well, how the hell the macro/function did _that_?
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I've bitten before by [Spring](http://spring.io/) and
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[Serde](https://serde.rs/) 'cause I started with the shortcuts without
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understanding what they were doing. And then I got a problem which the
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shortcut wouldn't solve, requiring me to go deep into the documentation. And
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because I skipped a few steps and jumped straight into the shortcut, it took
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me awhile to actually get _what_ I needed to do different from the shortcut to
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solve my problem: I had no idea what the shortcut did and, thus, I had no idea
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what I needed differently from the shortcut to solve my problem.
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{{ chapters(prev_chapter_link="/books/things-i-learnt/functional-programming", prev_chapter_title="Learn The Basics of Functional Programming", next_chapter_link="/books/things-i-learnt/integration-tests", next_chapter_title="Unit Tests Are Good, Integration Tests Are Gooder") }}
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