Bad abstraction is worse than no abstraction

If the code is going to poorly organized, I’d prefer it to just be one single gigantic standalone script than some wrong and misleading arrangement of objects or functions that adds more complexity than they solve

That depends, people can be smart but malicious, non-coorperative, or selfish.

The prisoner’s dilemma shows that there are systems where individually, the “smart” individual thing to do is globally non-optimal.

Even smartness and altruism alone isn’t enough. Medical professionals are smart and out to help others, but any ER doc/nurse will tell you they have limited trust in their patients (rightly so in the real world).

Does “everyone is smart” also include both “altruism and cooperative trust in others”?

Can that barrel hold fluids? B/c then what about the ocean or even the atmosphere? (Though it would take a while)

Could’ve held one rod end in each hand, letting middle of rope ladder hang down for standing on, like stirrups

Alternate left/right and you can step in any direction into the air

absolute beginner? Start at https://www.hedycode.com/

Which will ultimately lead into vanilla Python. This is the creator explaining why Hedy is uniquely designed for learning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmF7HpU_-9k

inheritance to avoid code duplication

What no, inheritance is not for code sharing

Sound bite aside, inheritance is a higher level concept. That it “shares code” is one of several effects.

The simple, plain, decoupled way to share code is the humble function call, i.e. static method in certain langs.

If you used good objects, you’ll only have to make the change in one place

IMO that’s generally a retroactive statement because in practice have to be lucky for that to be true. An abstraction along one dimension – even a good one, will limit flexibility in some other dimension.

Occasionally, everything comes into alignment and an opportunity appears to reliably-ish predict the correct abstraction the future will need.

Most every other time, you’re better off avoiding the possibility of the really costly bad abstraction by resisting the urge to abstract preemptively.

I’ve never seen these “express code/tests in natural language” ever work well. Your non-coders need lawyer-like skills to wield English very precisely, or it falls to coders that would be better off using code directly.

problems only have one answer and often one strategy to get to the answer

Totally disagree

You’re thinking of equations, which only have one answer. There are often many possible ways to solve and tackle problems.

If you’ll permit an analogy, even though there’s “only one way” to use a hammer and nail, the overall problem of joining wood can be solved in a variety of ways.

IMO mathematical/logical/abstract thinking is critical for programming well, but IMO that’s different from “math degree” math.

Software as a means to an end can be used in almost every domain, so proficiency within that applicable domain is often either useful or necessary. That is to say, “math degree” math is likely needed for 3d rendering (certain games), scientific computation (incl machine learning), etc, but maybe not, otherwise. It depends on what software you’re trying to build.

To be more specific, general programming is definitely and specifically different from trig and calc. However, because math is also broad, “mathy” concepts like type theory, relational algebra, set theory are considered important for programming, even if only informally or indirectly so.

I don’t understand, if you’ve got easy to delete copy-pasted code, then delete it. It’ll be a nice and cathartic exercise.

But sounds like what you’re really talking about is code that isn’t easy to delete.

That’s only because the former already implies much of the latter, so they don’t need to repeat it