I suspect that number comes from this quote a little further down
> Every function in this program was just two, or three, or four lines long. Each was transparently obvious. Each told a story. And each led you to the next in a compelling order. That’s how short your functions should be!
Thanks for pulling the quote. I agree. It is a distinction of "should be" and must be". FWIW: Uncle Bob clarified this exact topic in a recent youtube interview with Primeagen (about 5 months ago). The gist is if the length to have a single cohesive function is 50 lines, then so be it. It was clarified that clean code does not give a hard and fast limit (but does give a very weighty recommendation to go for small functions based on a number of heuristics).
1) I have the same background noise issue as the sibling comment. I can't have a conversation in a bar. Coffee shops are usually much more quiet, brightly lit, designed for sitting in and working/talking quietly.
2) It sucks to be the only sober person in a group. Caffeine doesn't have the same effect.
3) Bars are pretty hit or miss on if they have any non-alcaholic options (lemon juice concentrate + water doesn't count). Most coffee shops have great non-caffeinated options (horchatas, juices, smoothies/milkshakes, ciders, tisanes)
Only post singularity. Much of the appeal of roleplaying games is being able to do stuff that you can't do in video games. But a sibling comment did link to a tool that would let you play these maps with your friends by importing them into a virtual tabletop.
> refactoring without test coverage is flat-out "Cowboy coding": reckless & irresponsible.
This is basically what Fowler says in his refactoring book. Actually, he says it's by definition not refactoring. I'm curious why you don't think it's worth reading.
I suspect GP's complaint is not with Fowler, but with the list not including books that complement it. Like Beck's Test-Driven Development or Feathers' Working Effectively with Legacy Code or some others.
Yes! This is exactly my point. Having included something as fluff as "Essential Scrum" on TOP of skipping Beck's "TDD by Example" or Feathers' "Working Effectively with Legacy Code" is very regrettable.
There's a big grey area between the life threatening stuff, and the stuff that will slowly mess you up for life. Simple example, but the drugs people take for pain increase your odds of a heart attack if taken habitually. It feels deeply unethical to have "take drugs that will ruin you once your career is over" be the minimum requirement for a career in sports.
Sure, that big grey area also includes paracetamol, alcohol, smoking, even caffeine... — all allowed for both students and athletes even though we know of harm they can produce.
Many sports are life-ruinous by nature (check out those NFL head injury studies), yet we incentivise people to take part in them (by paying a lot for the games).
I always cringe when I hear from pro sportspeople how engaging in sports is promoting a healthy lifestyle: I mean, sure, unless overdone like all pro sports do.
> In the world of "decades ago" we are pre-smartphone. How, exactly, are you going to call up the taxi driver for a chat?
People... talked before phones were invented?
Why is it so hard to imagine that the guy from the car service you always use might exchange some small talk when he drops someone off? Sometimes a friendly relationship develops between people who regularly interact
The driver was a specific person that the company knew. Maybe they were a secret homophobe or something, but you could say that of all the company's employees with just as high a likelihood.
> It's absurd to trust this person like this
If your friend told you "man, my last customer was a jerk" you would distrust that?
A secret homophobe? Who said it was a secret? It's just as likely that it wasn't particularly secret.
If a homophobe was working for HR (in 2022) they would hide it, even to the extent of making sure to hire some percentage gays no matter what they thought personally.
> If your friend told you "man, my last customer was a jerk" you would distrust that?
My personal friend? That's the standard we're expecting from a giant corporation's bureaucracy? It just has its personal friends that it trusts.
That kind of thing is just gross, is my point. Maybe it's how everything works, welcome to the real world, etc. But it's nothing to be praised or admired.
The corporation should vet its "personal friends" at least as closely as its official HR personnel. Otherwise they're an unaccountable source of bias in the hiring process.
Observing how people behave around nominal subordinates is not a new trick or one that is gross. It's an interesting data point. This is unusual as rather than a receptionist or security guard, it is someone who doesn't work for the company.
That you think it's impossible to trust someone without formal vetting is really interesting to me. It suggests that formal vetting by Big Corps is useful but knowing someone from a significant number of interactions/conversations is worthless. I don't buy into that at all, I'd argue pretty strongly the inverse is true and vetting is garbage and interpersonal interactions are useful.
A little confused by what you mean. TTRPGs were not originally about tactical combat (old RPGs were very lethal so combat was a fail state), and wouldn't tactical combat (rather than the RP) make the game more soloable (lots of video games are just the combat part of an RPG)?
Quite the contrary. D&D was originally a supplement for Chainmail, a skirmish wargame, in which they started adding characterization elements. Many/most of the early RPGs were very crunchy, and a lot of people played them focused on combat and stats. But it had started by adding story elements to a wargame, and over the years it continued adding more.
In the middle era, the trend was obvious with games like Vampire: The Masquerade and its Storyteller system, coupled with the LARPing fad and some diceless games.
Since that era, the trend has continued. Many games now have little or no crunch at all, and focus almost entirely on world-building, storytelling, and improv. Some games, like the mentioned Microscope, along with Ex Novo and The Quiet Year are almost entirely crunchless world-building and storytelling.
You can go quite far with just oracles and no system at all, and then if you need one, easily pull in something modern and light like FATE, Mythic, or Fu RPG that just adds a few die rolls to your otherwise creative campaign.
And it can be more soloable than crunchy games because you don't need tons of rules and stats and dice rolls. You instead have creative prompts and oracles and source material and can just go with it, reading, interpreting, writing wherever your imagination takes you.
I did also do a lot of solo wargaming, so crunch is not un-soloable, but less crunch is easier and can feel more rewarding.
> Every function in this program was just two, or three, or four lines long. Each was transparently obvious. Each told a story. And each led you to the next in a compelling order. That’s how short your functions should be!