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Comment by beebmam | Hacker News Reader

In my opinion, good code is like a Brita filter. It does its job, will one day need to be replaced, and it should be easy to replace.

More importantly: metaphors are not a healthy way to understand an idea. Ideas are more nuanced than a metaphor could possibly account for. Abstaining from metaphors might not make for a catchy headline though.

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Little pushback here - metaphors are great tool to understand something, and can convey some meaning more efficiently than other means.

But "the map is not the territory"!

The territory isn't the territory either, so no big deal!

Metaphors are also ways of communicating ideas. A good metaphor is as simple or as complicated as it needs to be in illustrating a new concept

Problems arise as soon as you (ab)use a metaphor (used to explain a higher level/adjacent problem) to explain concepts it was never meant to model.

Example: Array of items as a shopping cart: how do you efficiently remove an item from the array (as you can from a shopping cart)?

There's always a possibility that a bad metaphor can be made, but this doesn't mean that metaphors themselves are bad. They require at least some consideration in order to communicate and relate the relevant details of something to another thing. It would be like criticizing multiplication because sometimes people forget to carry extra values

metaphors are like, herding .. fine old .. elephants .. in the air

good code is like vintage wine: you don’t recognise the packaging, no-one agrees on how exactly to describe why it’s good, and the only person who still remembers all the details of production retired ten years ago

Why can’t good code be all of the above?

Thinking about code this way takes nothing away from appropriately deep explorations of nuance.

They coexist without issue.

Is this supposed to be ironic? Your first sentence was a metaphor.

I think the issue you may have with metaphors is that people tend to argue the metaphor rather than engage with the concept.

Arguing the metaphor is pointless, because the metaphor isn’t the thing, it’s just a way to explain an aspect of the thing.

In my opinion, metaphors are like a picture. They can communicate vast amounts of information very quickly but can have inaccuracies.

You should expect some additional nuance when receiving a metaphor.

Metaphors are a fine way to understand an idea if one accepts that their purpose is to leverage an existing understanding of something, and that they're lossy. So I guess my issue with your comment's second half is that I don't think metaphors are being used as a shortcut to a full and complete understanding of a topic. They're an aid and I think that is mostly how they're used, IME. I don't think they should be written off.

Unrelated, but lately I find that I have a much harder time learning with metaphors than if educators and explainers would just speak directly about things. I had very terrible experiences learning physics because teachers would always resort to weird metaphors, about music, about electricity being like a river, and more.

The headline is a simile.

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