Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by kickopotomus 2496 days ago
This has been my experience as well. I have a couple of Clojure(Script) applications that are approximately 3-5K lines each and those have been a pleasure too work on. However, my latest project is now pushing past 20K lines and the mental load has jumped exponentially. There is a much greater need for spec, asserts, type hints, and comments just to keep everything straight.
1 comments
slifin 2495 days ago
That's interesting do you have any idea why the mental load jumped? would a static analysis tool working with your type hints help?

Or is there many things to consider at once in the system instead of many individual things?

link
kickopotomus 2494 days ago
The biggest issue I keep running into is just the concept of data "shape". I love that clojure gives you so much freedom but it can be quite the footgun in a large system because you see that a function expects a map with keys :foo, :bar, and :baz but what are the values for those keys? Spec helps a little bit here for primitive values but for complex nested structures (e.g. {:a [{:b [1 2]} {:c "bar"}]}), it doesn't do much. So, as data moves through the system, and as the system grows it has become increasingly difficult to track the mutations to the underlying structures.

I do think that a static analysis tool would be of some help. Some sort of tooling to better handle tree structures would be very handy. I often find myself being off-by-one level with get-in calls on tree data (E.g. (get-in m [:a :b :d]) where m is {:a {:b {:c {:d 1}}}}), which is annoying because the NPE gets thrown 3 function calls up the stack.

link
escherize 2486 days ago
I'm late to the thread, but I've felt the same pain and wrote a library to help deal with the cognitive load of working on "shapes" of data [1].

[1] https://github.com/escherize/tracks

link
sooheon 2493 days ago
Totally not saying "you're holding it wrong", but maybe once you're more than a few couple levels deep into a nested map it's time to look at an in memory db like [Datascript](https://github.com/tonsky/datascript)? Actual Datalog queries can replace get-in vectors growing out of hand, and you also get better mutations with transactions.
link