graydon: (Default)
graydon ([personal profile] graydon) wrote in [personal profile] jsburbidge 2020-01-24 04:03 am (UTC)

The idea that coding pays well has lingered longer than the pay has!

Abstraction is hard; the old OR dicta that you can automate anything you can fully specify has teeth, and fangs, and tentacles.

I just finished something that's got a multi-entrant/multi-exit recursive grouping setup because the entirely flat input has four kinds of notes, three of which have different relationships to list levels. I am very aware that I don't understand the whole thing at any one time and that it doesn't quite do precisely the right thing. Now that I've done it, I would want to approach the whole problem differently, but it's a one-off for a specific "cheaply as possible" conversion exercise. Which is another part of the problem with Fred; code code is expensive.

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