I’ve been reading the book ANSI Common Lisp by pg, and decided to work through some of the exercises that piqued my interest.
Similar to what you are talking about here, I worked on one of the problems for a while. Not in a REPL, but in a similar manner. And I arrived at a solution that is not advanced or anything, but which I was quite satisfied with. It occurred to me then that my solution to the problem I was working on really only made sense because I had worked through the problem.
For this reason I left a printout of two of my hash tables in the code. Because when you see what data they actually have in them it becomes quite obvious what the code is doing. Whereas without those two printouts you’d have to “simulate” in your brain what the code is doing.
And so for that reason I left the printouts in my code.
But this also ties into a more general problem in software development which is that even though our tools are becoming really really good and our computers really really fast there is still a long ways to go in terms of how deeply and how completely we can really see what’s going on.
I was thinking about this recently when I was at the dentist to pull a tooth. It was not a fun experience but even so I saw that the dentist had both the skill and the tools for making the operation. And in particular the tools he had at his disposal allowed him to understand and to operate on my teeth. And that got me thinking once again about the lack of visibility that we have when we develop software.
Similar to what you are talking about here, I worked on one of the problems for a while. Not in a REPL, but in a similar manner. And I arrived at a solution that is not advanced or anything, but which I was quite satisfied with. It occurred to me then that my solution to the problem I was working on really only made sense because I had worked through the problem.
For this reason I left a printout of two of my hash tables in the code. Because when you see what data they actually have in them it becomes quite obvious what the code is doing. Whereas without those two printouts you’d have to “simulate” in your brain what the code is doing.
And so for that reason I left the printouts in my code.
But this also ties into a more general problem in software development which is that even though our tools are becoming really really good and our computers really really fast there is still a long ways to go in terms of how deeply and how completely we can really see what’s going on.
I was thinking about this recently when I was at the dentist to pull a tooth. It was not a fun experience but even so I saw that the dentist had both the skill and the tools for making the operation. And in particular the tools he had at his disposal allowed him to understand and to operate on my teeth. And that got me thinking once again about the lack of visibility that we have when we develop software.