It’s the new “promotion machine.” The first manager: “I saved this company x dollars using AI, promote me.” The new manager: “I increased productivity by x percent getting rid of AI, promote me.” Repeat.
C) Write a highly specific, custom-tailored boilerplate generator that does 80% of the work and needs only a day or two to implement.
This sounds just extremely dumb to me, as in “do something manually for 2 minutes or spend 2 days automating it”
Also, DRY in 90% of the cases is a sham
DRY is usually helpful if you don’t use it in situations where you have like 2 semi-different things. If they’re actually the same and you have 3 or more then the level of abstraction is worth it almost always.
To me, there are two classifications of DRY - one I find harmful, the other very useful.
First one resembles mathematical extractions, essentially you never allow a single chunk of code to be written twice and you create massive amounts of global util junk. This also creates some bad tight coupling.
The other is more logical, where you only extract logic in places you want to always change together. Simple and effective.
Completely depends on how often you need to write boilerplate code, and how error-prone it is.
After writing hundreds of instances of ‘fetch this from the server and show an error if it doesn’t work’, I finally wrote a helper for that. It took 2 hours, shouts at me if I use it wrong, and instantly makes my classes easier to read because all the boilerplate is gone. As an added bonus, the invocation is so small that Copilot can write it error-free, which it couldn’t before.
So fetching things is now a thing of a few seconds instead of one minute with a chance of making a mistake. I say it’s worth it.
I remember 10 years or so ago working with a guy who was trying to sell me on the wonders of Eclipse. “It writes all this boilerplate for you!” I was more interested in writing in languages that were less shit and required less boilerplate.
It’s always the AI. We all know they’re pushing the AI button before even reading the rest of the label!
I don’t get it, what’s so bad about boilerplate?
https://lemmy.world/comment/13098712
dis 'bout you?
Writing code is bad!
Writes condensed configurations and properties files in 3 different languages instead. Cloud deployment uses yet another source of configurations and properties.
Doesn’t write documentation for configuration and properties.
Ah, yes, that’s much more readable.
well why is it good? why not just assume the boilerplate as the default and require the user to override it if they want to do something fancy?
it’s just busywork to always need to write the same stuff, and it also makes the code less readable and many people look at all that boilerplate and nope the fuck out.
This is why python is so good for getting people to realize that programming isn’t magic, you just write the equivalent of one short sentence and BAM text in the terminal, no need to import the basic ability to print text which is so incredibly inane.
It’s the most boring thing of the technical side of the job especially at the more senior levels because it’s so mindnumbingly simple, uses a significant proportion of development time and is usually what ends up having to be redone if there are small changes in things like input or output interfaces (i.e. adding, removing or changing data fields) which is why it’s probably one of the main elements in making maintaining and updating code already in Production a far less pleasant side of job than the actual creation of the application/system is.
Boilerplate is bad because it’s fundamentally just noise. When you read the code you want to be able to tell what the purpose of the code is and what the problem it solves. Ideally, code should be expressing that as clearly as possible. Having a lot of boilerplate is typically an indication that the language semantics don’t allow you to express the solution in a clear way and you have to write a lot of incidental code. The more code you have to read the more cognitive overhead there is in understanding it and keeping it all in your head.