Hacker News Reader

Comment by zwkrt | Hacker News Reader

There’s a lot of complaining and not a lot of suggesting going on in this article so I don’t take it for very much. I feel like the author got a job and realized that it almost exclusively involves writing glue code and tests and looking at text diffs, so how convenient to imagine a world where they didn’t have to do the boring parts of their job.

View on HN

I think the author is identifying problems. Problems most people just take for granted. I give the author credit for that.

I think you're being unnecessarily harsh. I get your point about OP presenting problems, not solutions, but on the other hand, they are a programmer & they are clearly trying to automate the repetitive parts of the job. Isn't that basically the essence of programming: what good programmers should be doing is automating as much of their job as possible.

very much agreed. i don’t like the term glue code. when people say glue what they usually mean is their applications specific business logic

a Shannon-inspired taxonomy (note the indefinite object; ymmv):

- glue code: given the outputs, you can reconstruct the inputs. this code translates between formats, between systems, etc.

- parsley code: given the outputs, you could reconstruct the inputs. this code "gussies up" its inputs: it takes table rows to JSON, or JSON to framework objects, PDF, etc. so in principle the original data is still there, but once the outputs are sufficiently complex the inputs become extremely awkward to reconstitute.

- crunch code: given the outputs, you have no hope of reconstructing the inputs. this code does real computation, and forgets stuff. Example: You can get a source program given only an executable, but you won't get the source that it was compiled from (nor will you, without a lot of work, even get a source you're willing to read)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com