Saturday, August 26, 2017

Immutability and Bad Code

I don't often watch videos about coding, but I'm on a jag of it, lately. Picked up a few things on the horizon on the way. GraphQL (an alternative to REST) one of them. CSS Grids another.  (And, as an aside, a fascinating video called Braids in Higher Dimensions). One video in particular I'd like to highlight is this talk by a fellow named Lee Byron at an event called Full Stack Fest in 2016.  It's longish, but if you're a developer on a videos-about-coding jag, too, and it's currently not much past 2017, it might be worth your time.

 

It's a discussion on immutability, not just in user interfaces, but in the entire server-to-user-and-back cycle (He's essentially talking about React without ever actually mentioning React).  But his final words are an articulation of something that I feel many developers, and those who herd them, lose sight of.
MVC and REST did not solve all of the problems that we face in app development. But what I've presented today, also won't. These ideas are going to be far from flawless, and they might not be right for the app that you're building. And I want all of us to continue to challenge the notion that there is one right way to do things.  It's not true. 
I encounter often an almost religious conviction about various frameworks and approaches as talismans against writing bad code or buggy apps.  I have seen people - decent coders, otherwise - unwilling or unable to code without first finding a framework or an approach that other people acknowledge is the right way to do things™. And then, finding this (non-existent) consensus and carefully following all of those guidelines, frameworks and recommendations, they still write overwrought, overengineered, buggy applications that are difficult to maintain.