Is it really tempting for people? They’ve given me too many headaches when I’ve had to reformat or add functionality to files.
Unless it’s a simple single use script that fit on the computer screen, I don’t feel like global variables would ever be tempting, unless it’s for constants.
Most people suck at software engineering.
Plus, there’s always the temptation to do it the shitty way and “fix it later” (which never happens).
You pay your technical debt. One way or another.
It’s way worse than any gangster.
amen
Plus, there’s always the temptation to do it the shitty way and “fix it later”
double amen
// TODO: Fix later
Later is the name of the intern my company hired when I resigned :)
I wish I was so lucky to have comments.
in real life, I’m fighting with - I’m not joking - a few dozen “quick patches”. code does not reflect in any point functional requirements, and dude is adamant he’s in the right and supersarcastic in any occasion.
I’ve been working at my current company for almost a year.
I had no idea it could be this bad.
I actually had to fight/plead with someone to “please read the code”. Guy did get fired though.
Rarely have I ever actually had consequences for my sins, which tends to be why I don’t go back and fix them…
If tech debt weight is felt in any way, it tends to get fixed. If it’s not felt, it’s just incredibly easy to forget and disregard.
(This is mostly me not learning my lesson well enough from my time being on Tech Debt: The Team. I do try and figure out the correct way to do things, but at the end of the day, I get paid to do what the boss wants as cheaply as possible, not what’s right :/ money dgaf about best practices until someone gets sued for malpractice, but on that logic, maybe the tech debt piper just hasn’t returned for payment from me yet… Only time will tell)
For me most of the people who have written our most annoying tech debt left the company long time ago.
Ah yeah, that would be a worry, except I forgot to mention that most of the code I work on usually gets thrown away after like 6 months. Makes tech debt not have nearly as big of an impact on me.
We do have a longer lasting code base that the little widgets I make run off of. That has a much more strict requirements to ensure tech debt is not introduced specifically so we don’t end up in that sort of a position.
That said, and yet we couldn’t even keep it out of our own code base. So yeah, I think my original comment is just wrong because I forgot all the ways tech debt actually has effected me in the past and how my industry’s project cycle is so short term that i rarely have the opportunity to run into tech debt that I caused in a problematic way…
That make sense. Most industry best practices are there to prevent problems that arises when code is evolving over a long period of time.
Yeah, that makes total sense.
Most software engineers also have to actively maintain and add features to their finished project, and those aspects change a lot about how the problem can be approached.
I failed to take into account why might I have not been effected by tech debt despite occasionally creating it before commenting. Will have to make sure that filter gets a bit stronger lol
What industry do you work in?
Fair point, I work in a consumer facing, fast turn around, short lived code project industry. Not a typical software project with long life cycles.
These practices would almost certainly bite my company in the ass if we had to maintain anything for longer than year.
Occasionally, we do have to support a client for multiple years, and everytime it’s a hilarious shit show trying to figure out how to keep all the project dependencies up to date. This is likely platform tech debt, and would be the beginning of the problem if we didn’t have the privilege of being able to start over from scratch code-wise for each client’s new order.
I guess I’m just in a lucky spot in the programmer pool where tech debt literally doesn’t hit me as hard as it usually does others, and I just couldn’t identify that before now lol
Instead of saying tech debt isn’t that bad, my tune will change to something else. Like I said, I was on a team at one point that had a worse than usual tech debt problem, and it was unworkably stressful to deal with. Im guessing that experience is more typical of being near tech debt than my other experiences.
Good on you for acknowledging that. 👍
I’ve fixed 20 year old issues that could kill people.
Different requirements. Different solutions.
That’s why it’s great to be an engineer!
If you’re smart you do it the quick and easy way and leave the company before it bites you in the ass. Only suckers stay with the same company for more than a few years
and thats why we are reading a book about clean code at my apprenticeship
This community makes more sense when you realize the majority of users are CS students.
Pointers hard!! LOL
Is it really tempting for people? They’ve given me too many headaches when I’ve had to reformat or add functionality to files.
I don’t get it either. Why would you ever feel the need for them to begin with?
In software that’s already badly engineered. Either you do the work and refactor everything, or accept it’s probably not worth all the effort.
Unironically: For in-house scripts and toolboxes where I want to set stuff like input directory, output directory etc. for the whole toolbox, and then just run the scripts. There are other easy solutions of course, but this makes it really quick and easy to just run the scripts when I need to.
But those would be constants, not variables.
I typically don’t declare them as such - bring the pitchforks!
Everything’s a variable if you’re brave enough.
My
void*doesn’t care about yourconst!
As with the sexual connotation here, the temptation is not rooted in long-term considerations like future maintainability
Depends on what you’re doing. Functional programming has its own downsides, especially once you want to write interactive programs, which often depend on global states. Then you either have to rely on atoms, which defeat the purpose of the functional programming, or pass around the program state, which is janly and can be slow.
I personally go multi paradigm. Simpler stuffs are almost functional (did not opt for consting everything due to performance issues), GUI stuff is OOP, etc.
Well, if you’re writing something the user will be looking at and clicking on, you will probably want to have some sort of state management that is global.
Or if you’re writing something that seems really simple and it’s own thing at first but then SURPRISE it is part of the system and a bunch of other programmers have incorporated it into their stuff and the business analyst is inquiring if you could make it configurable and also add a bunch of functionality.
I also had to work with a system where configurations for user space were done as libraries setting global constants. And then we changed it so everything had to be hastily redone so that suddenly every client didn’t have the same config.
Just create a global object and stuff your variable in there. Now you have a global singleton and that’s not a purely bad practice :D
Just call it “state management” and nobody will even care.
Not necessarily a bad practice if the singleton is immutable, and it’s provided via dependency injection for example.
As a hobby coder: “mmmhm, mmmm, mmhm… I know some of these words!”
Software dev is full of obscure keywords that describe otherwise pretty simple or basic concepts you stumble upon in practice naturally and that you probably already understand.
- singleton: a class/object that is designed to be single use, i.e. only ever instantiated with a single instance. Typically used when you use class/objects more for flow control or to represent the state of the program itself, rather than using it to represent data
- immutable: read-only, i.e. unchangeable
- dependency injection: basically when you pass a function or object into another function object, thereby extending their effective functionality, typically for modular code and to separate concerns.
Here’s one more of my favourite examples of such a keyword: memoization
Ahh yes memoization, the complicated way to say “remember this, I might need it again”
Important to contain all your mess to one side of the room, makes it easier to manage
Yeah yeah let’s put all the eggs in one basket
So you saying, just the tip?
Real enterprise programmers know that everything should be on the stack… so they declare a
List《void*》in main.But we might need to add more features in the future so it might not just be a list in a few years. Better encapsulate it in a few layers of abstractions just to be safe.
Real enterprise programmers know you can get another job in the next year or two so fuck best practice
I do this all the time in Python by creating a class like
class Core: foo = "bar"Ah yes. Global Objects, AKA the thinnest of condoms, lol.
You can do better, define intergalactic variables that share the same memory location across multiple programs so you can seamlessly pass variables from one to the next.
The ONE TRUE CONSTANT; even with an infinite universe, the value is the same in all of them.
Are the legends really true?
Is that you… Windows 95?
But not sand memory. It’s coars ena drogjh and irritating and gets everywhere.
Singletons:
Me: O_O;
Is it an orgy if multiple global variables are used in a multi threaded code?
not if everyone uses a Mutex. stay (thread) safe
Always practice safe stacks
“But what if I put the whole program into a class and then made it a class wide variable?”
I am not a programmer who knows how to program. I know this because global variables are how I fix most the issue I run into, but are constantly told this wrong.
Exhibitionist Devs be like.
Me putting everything in ‘public:’
Our Father, who art in Microsoft HQ,
hallowed be thy naming conventions;
thy architecture;
thy will be done;
on earth as it is in Linus Tech Tips.
Give us this day our daily StackOverflow.
And forgive us our 'sploits,
as we forgive those who trespass against our user stories.
And lead us not into temptation;
but deliver us from a thicket of global variables.
For thine is the irritating project manager, the power and the glory,
for ever and ever.
Or at least 7 years until obsolescence.
Amen.
the meme is spreading
Nothing wrong with global variables.
If anyone asks just say it’s the singleton pattern.
Have you tried #ifdef’d global variables? Should definitely make things easier to read
Nowadays they call it global state lol
Ironically, a guy named SingletonSean showed me how to avoid singletons.
