I’ll try to do better in the next life.
4,323 karma · joined September 27, 2021
Now you’ve stepped beyond the walled gardens of the managed memory. How is that an abstraction leak?
> It's also quite plausible to write a program in a GC language which leaks memory, by accidentally retaining a reference to something which you thought you'd deleted the last reference to.
That the user just thought they had gotten rid of? If the memory is technically reachable then that doesn’t sound like its fault. I’m reminded of the recent Rust Vec thread on how the so-called space leak of reusing allocated memory lead to unreasonable memory consumption. But to my recollection that wasn’t a leak in the sense of unreachable-but-not-freed. I do agree however (with those that made this point) that the Vec behavior was too clever. Which goes to show that Vec should probably just stick to the front-page abstraction advertised: will amortize allocations, can shrink to fit if you tell it to, nothing much more fancy beyond that.
(The memory leak topic seems very fuzzy in general.)
The argument is disqualified at this point. The whole world is a leaky abstraction because <freak meteor hit could happen>. At this point your concept is all-encompassing and in turn useless.
There are assumptions: this computation will finish eventually [assuming that no one unplugs the computer itself]. This does not make things leaky.
There are leaky abstractions I guess but not all are. A garbage collector that can cause memory errors would be leaky. I don’t know anything about garbage colletors but in my experience they don’t.
Then someone says that a garbage collector is leaky because of performance concerns (throughput or latency). That’s not a leak: that’s part of the abstracting away part—some concerns are abstracted away. To abstract away means to make it something that you can’t fudge or change. To say that “this is implementation-defined”. An abstract list is an abstraction in the sense that it has some behavior. And also in the sense that it doesn’t say how those behaviors are implemented. That’s both a freedom and a lurking problem (sometimes). Big reallocation because of amortized push? Well you abstracted that away so can you complain about it? Maybe your next step is to move beyond the abstraction and into the more concrete.
What are abstractions without something to abstract away? They are impossible. You have to have the freedom to leave some things blank.
So what Spolsky is effectively saying is that abstractions are abstractions. That looks more like a rhetorical device than a new argument. (Taxes are theft?)
EDIT: Flagged for an opinion? Very well.
Without such a group you might just send a few emails to mailing list, get shrugs about how that plan “looks good” with little real interest, and then have to discuss this big plan in every future patch series that incrementally builds such a thing into Git itself. Mostly why such code should be incorporated and how it will pay off when it’s all ready.
The Git tool itself—and the project by extension—is per now very unopinioated about whole-project solutions like this. The workflow that they themselves use is very loosely coupled and pretty much needs bespoke scripting by individual contributors, which I guess is telling in itself.
What’s the alternative? That at least N projects cooperate and agree on a common design before they do the implementation? (Then maybe someone can complain about design-by-committee.)
And by primitive I mean that I want to be able to commit whenever I feel like I want a snapshot. For any reason. Not hindered by concepts like does-it-build. That’s the low level. Then at the higher level are things like “public history” and “tested history”. That’s facilitated by the low/mid-level history rewriting tools.
Some people I know use Intellij’s “shelve” feature or whatever it is called. Interestingly it does provide some features that Git does not seem to have—and overlaps with GitButler—but it’s own bespoke thing, not integrated with Git.
And using these extra concepts on top of (or under?) Git doesn’t make sense for my workflow. Because the VCS is already there. So I don’t need to think about if I’m ready-to-commit—just make a WIP or a TEST commit, maybe discard later or maybe rewrite them.
For me, Git covers everything from snapshotting some private notes I have on the work that I’m currently doing to making a nice:
> useful commit [history], both for any reviewers at the time and any code spelunkers 10 years into the future.
It provides that whole range.
The index + commits is flexible enough. The stash concept is not needed for me.
I don’t want to fiddle with dropping the stash one too many times, forgetting what they were about and so on. Merge conflicts because I didn’t pop before resuming..
It’s just a mostly useless additional “thing”.
The submitter unhelpfully didn’t mention the name in the title.
But is it overkill for some fast translation fixes? Yeah, probably:)
(Again this is what git-reset(1) and friends are for)
Just one concept instead of (1) commits (2) stash (3) oh these changes, eh, I don’t know what to do with them... let’s think about it after lunch.
Checking out the same commit is fine. You just can’t checkout the same branch.
This is not a problem for me because I either use detached head (if say I’m going to build from some commit) or restrict branches to certain worktrees naturally (if I am backporting to `old-version` on a worktree then... it’s not like that backport branch is ever going to be relevant in my main worktree where I do most of my work).
I mostly use worktrees for very separate things. Like: long-running build, way old or way new versions of the app. Then it doesn’t make sense to mix-and-match virtual branches. So when I want to build the app for deployment I don’t want to worry about whatever other changes getting in the way. Git worktrees doesn’t solve the same problem as what GitButler does. Worktrees is a streamlined way of the manual separate-clone workflow for the same repository. (Technically they are all distinct repositories once you clone them but ya know.)
I do have use for separate-from-branch files. Like notes to myself and test scripts that aren’t going into the branch. Crucially these files have nothing to do with the main work: the files themselves are not involved, so there can never be merge conflicts.
This GitButler workflow makes sense for things that (1) won’t cause merge conflicts and (2) which won’t step on each others’ toes. The example about a translation and code change is nice. Doing a translation at the same time as a code change is not likely to “break the build”.
On the other hand if I don’t sign my commits then any signed commits (from my stolen private key (SSH)) look out of place. Like it’s weird that all these malicious commits are also signed, even though I have never signed commits.
I don’t really have belief in the processes of these corporate environment unless the auditing is given on a silver platter.
Meanwhile on email: people get an email per patch, where the commit message part has to contain a `From:` line in order to override the email-is-author behavior.
PS: There is a utility to giving commit authorship to someone else. Someone sends me the change through a DM. I commit it. Did I author it? No, so I give that to them. Not an exotic use-case at all of this seemingly nefarious feature.
In my own work, the surrounding context is sufficient verification.
By the way: patch attestation [1] is perhaps somewhat related. Pretty well-thought out techniques for verifying that patches sent via email.
I am—for some reason—reminded of philosophers who go looking for metaphysical problems, disputes, etc. where there aren’t any.[1]
But it’s a red herring in any case since enum types are such a basic programming language feature. No need to evoke the Cool Kids languages at all.
I already made the point that a search engine can just search for the given string and not muck about with user-specific data… that’s what the user expects a lot of the time.
That’s two options. What are the others that are meaningfully different? You have to be able to deal with simple “sum types” in the sense of: this type could take on the value of one of these X predetermined constants. This requirement doesn’t disappear just because the language doesn’t directly support it.
The worst case is… arbitrarily bad, to the point of being impossible. Test setup is hell because there are too many dependencies. You have to mock the “real world” since (again) things depend on other things too much and you can’t really do a simple string-manipulating change without setting up a whole environment. Also you introduce bugs in your tests that take longer to debug than the real change you are making.
What I feel that we (current project) have fallen into the trap of is that there wasn’t a test suite from the start. Just manual testing. Then when you get to a stage where you feel you need one, the code base is not structured to make automated testing simple.