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Comment by maest | Hacker News Reader

What are your main objections to BTD loops? Also, which alternatives do you suggest?

Software development is the BTD loop; you can't eliminate it. I got my start with Logo[1], which has an amazing BTD loop! People like Bret Victor[2] have talked at length about it (although Victor doesn't use that term, IIRC). Even the trend toward "notebook programming" - Jupyter, Observable, etc are really about shortening that loop. A major reason to use an IDE is to potentially shorten the BTD loop. Lots and lots of tools exist specifically to shorten this loop.

And yet some organizations want to run all the linters, all the tests, for all the languages, orchestrated by Jenkins on a huge Amazon cluster. This is bad.

[1] This is very cool - an Apple IIe emulator running Logo in the browser. https://www.scullinsteel.com/apple2/#logo

[2] Inventing on Principle has improving the BTD loop at its core https://vimeo.com/36579366

Well, I don't see how linters/test on a final cluster is bad. This is why we have unit/integration/alpha/canary tests. The first 1 can happen on my laptop over 5 seconds while the second can happen on my personal instance over 20 minutes. Usually first means the second will pass and I just need to run it in the background without breaking any workflows.

i.e. It might not be a bad feedback loop, you just need more of them that are faster.

5 seconds is already painful, the point of the other poster is to delay that stuff until the end. When the BTD loop is long it's a looooooot harder to get into the flow, and you have difficult really thinking about the problem.

Imagine trying to read a novel but after every paragraph you had to stop and wait for 5-10 seconds.

My main objection is it dramatically decreases your productivity. If building and testing takes 5-10mins (which is the case in our codebase) trying to fix a bug can take forever when you aren't exactly sure what the cause is. You don't want to try multiple fixes simultaneously because if something doesn't work you aren't sure which of the fixes (if any) might be causing the issue.

Maybe a different way to look at it is: if you could shorten the BTD loop to a minute or two, why _wouldn't_ you want that?

I would have less time to legitimately read Hackernews!

My first job, the BTD loop was at least an hour. This was 2015.

Not OP, but I share the same dislike. Note that he said that he is against long BTD loops, not BTD loops in general. If it takes more than 5 minutes to get more information about a problem, my mind will wander. I'll check email, read up on conference proceedings, etc. If it takes 15 seconds to get more information, then I can keep focus on the current problem, add the new information, and iterate appropriately.

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