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20190612.1
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Julio Biason 5 years ago
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      content/thoughts/things-i-learnt-the-hard-way.md

37
content/thoughts/things-i-learnt-the-hard-way.md

@ -67,6 +67,19 @@ can give you a better view on how their API looks like. Then you can have a
better look on how to call things: Is the API too complex? Do you have to keep
to much data around to be able to make a single call?
### Be ready to throw your code away
A lot of people, when they start with TDD, get annoyed when you say that you
may have to rewrite a lot of stuff, including whatever your already wrote.
TDD was _designed_ to throw code away: The more you learn about your problem,
the more you understand that, whatever you wrote, won't solve the problem in
the long run.
You shouldn't worry about this. Your code is not a wall: if you have to throw
it aways, it is not wasted material. Surely it means your time writing code
was lost, but you got a better understanding about the problem now.
### Good languages come with integrated tests
You can be sure that if a language brings a testing framework -- even minimal
@ -230,10 +243,13 @@ I saw this happens _a lot_: We have this problem; a design pattern gets close
to the proper solution; let's use the design pattern; now we need to add a lot
of things around the proper solution to make it fit the pattern.
### Cognitive Dissonance is the readability killer
### Cognitive Cost is the readability killer
"Cognitive dissonance" is a fancy way of saying "I need to remember two (or
more) different things at the same time to understand this."
"[Cognitive dissonance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance)"
is a fancy way of saying "I need to remember two (or more) different things at
the same time to understand this." Keeping those different things in your head
creates a cost and it keeps accumulating the more inditect the things are
('cause you'll have to keep all those in your head).
For example, adding booleans to count the number of True values is a mild
cognitive dissonance; if you're reading a piece of code and see a `sum()`
@ -243,8 +259,9 @@ count number of True values in a list of booleans, which is confusing as heck.
### The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two
"The magical number" is a psychology article about the number of things one
can keep in their mind at the same time.
"[The magical number](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_or_Minus_Two)"
is a psychology article about the number of things one can keep in their mind
at the same time.
If you have a function, that calls a function, that calls a function, that
calls a function, that calls a function, that calls function, you may be sure
@ -685,3 +702,13 @@ Don't Know".
When you find something that seems cool and you'd like to know more, create a
file/note/whatever with it in the title. Then make notes about what you
find/figure out.
---
**Changelong**:
* 2019-06-12:
* Renamed "Cognitive Dissonance" to "Cognitive Cost", as pointed by
[hellomudder](https://old.reddit.com/user/hellomudder).
* As reminded by [DeviceMan](https://old.reddit.com/user/DevIceMan),
I added the "throw away your code" point.

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