Does anyone here know any mathematicians who can’t do long division or basic algebra?
Probably not, because they *don’t exist because learning basic math is necessary to learn higher level math*. Whether or not we have calculators to do basic math is irrelevant if you want to become a mathematician.
I’d argue that “whether or not the average dev will be writing any code by hand in 5 years” is irrelevant to whether or not one should learn to code *if they want to master designing and building complex software* using whatever method they will be using.
i don’t think anything in the article advocates for not prioritizing “single source of truth”, as in, if we know that there are multiple sources of truth for something, it should absolutely be deduped. the article is more saying “be a bit more skeptical of any two pieces of code actually representing the same thing” and “be more willing to break apart an abstraction that is trying to represent multiple truths.”
I feel this deeply. Although abstraction isn’t a one way door, “deduplicating” logic tends to be much easier than breaking big functions back down, and so these days I tend to leave a comment with the date wondering if it is too similar to some other code. then if i come across it again months later and it still is, then maybe it is safe to make it DRY.
I think DRY is the first heuristic for “good code” that most junior devs actually grasp, and so they become very dogmatic about it for a while
We have cross-field invariants that merging at the data structure level can't ensure (in an obvious way, at least), and "lose the semantic meaning of a conflict". The main idea behind their approach is that certain parts of the model can have custom "mergers" that are able to run business logic to maintain these invariants.
Worth noting, the decision to eschew CRDTs predates my time here, and I've pushed for a CRDT rewrite quite a bit since I believe it could be done. The other main concern they had was memory usage, but it seems like EG Walker would solve that. Our system uses a "Commit DAG", (an Event DAG by another name), and does a three-way merge using a common ancestor of the diverged documents, and so a lot of the bones of EG Walker are there, and I'm exploring ways in which we could gradually move to it.
I was about to ask where you work that you’re implementing new CRDTs and then I noticed your username! Thanks for all that you do!
I work on the live collab at my company, and using AI while coding has into recently sort of “clicked” for me. We use an (I’m pretty sure) unheard of algorithm for collaborative editing, and I’ve had a long term goal of turning it into an implementation of EG Walker, but our document model is very complex and most out of the box CRDTs don’t quite fit. Maybe Fable will be what gets me over the hump.
> At some point, execution speed starts to matter more than the elegance of the code.
If this were true, shouldn’t most of the software we use be adding new features and fixing bugs at a faster rate, while
becoming more stable?
Do you feel like that is happening? Do you have an example of an app (besides claude code or cursor etc) that you use that has seemed to improve more rapidly since the advent of agentic coding?