

Can Tools Make Coding Too Easy? - javinpaul
http://www.coderslexicon.com/can-tools-make-coding-too-easy/

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dguaraglia
I agree to a certain extent. If my short stint interviewing with various
companies in the last month and a half taught me anything is this: I've been
using high-level languages and frameworks for so long, that even though I
don't have any problems understanding the low level implementation (pointers,
in-memory word alignment/packing, etc) I still struggled somewhat when
actually writing the implementation.

It was a humbling experience, knowing that 20 year old me would beat my ass at
writing an AVL tree. But at the same time, I can't really say I'd enjoy having
to go back and rewrite my own abstract types every time. I guess I'll just try
to give myself a refresher every now and then, for exercise's sake.

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ktosiek
The tools he writes about make writing code easier, but don't help with
reading it - they just generate the boilerplate. It's a bit like checking in
code after macro expansion - if the programmer didn't want to write all this
stuff, why force others to read it?

But I don't think it means we should write more by hand - I would rather write
in a concise language that requires knowledge of few less common abstractions,
than in something so verbose I keep mixing generated and hand-written code
together! As the article says, this mix often obfuscates intended meaning, as
it's sometimes hard to tell boilerplate from necessary logic.

