Only in the sense that the lion is a specialized type of mammal, rather than king of the jungle.
Caches are global state in sheep’s clothing. In many languages and implementations, they can be mutable shared state, which leads to unexpected side effects and concurrency bugs that may cross transaction or user boundaries. It’s a covert channel where code interacts without ever talking to each other. In languages without static analysis you cannot determine quickly which pieces of code talk in this fashion. It’s all secretly coupled instead of overtly coupled. You only learn by vast experience, and in the interim you make mistakes, which makes the oldest team members appear capable and the newest unworthy of trust. But it’s the people who tilted this playing field that you can’t trust. In a word: toxic.
Done right, memoization shows up clearly in your sequence diagrams, near the heart of your architecture. The top level of the code knows what’s going on, and orchestrates communication. People walking in off the street can figure out what the hell is happening, and be productive in short order.
It can often force you to think about when your system of record and your source of truth diverge. Usually I see people cache low quality precursor data for a decision, and then they have to cook it every time.
The thing I liked most about AngularJS was that you were meant to fetch all of your data fairly early in an interaction, mis-en-place style. If the data you got was a little garbage, you cooked it before any interface code ever saw it. The view just saw the nice version.
Doing so affords another architectural tool. All of that cleanup code can be moved to the backend or the database in a single refactoring, getting it out of the client. And the overt coupling makes you contend with the fact that a piece of code talks to too many hints to get its job done. It’s a mirror some do t want to look in.
The problem is, all of this involves making decisions, and a lot of developers either never learned, or learned to distrust their decisions. And rather than finding way to mitigate a bad decision, far too many of us have instead spent years or decades learning how never to make a decision at all. We’d be a lot better off with strong opinions loosely held.
Caches are global state in sheep’s clothing. In many languages and implementations, they can be mutable shared state, which leads to unexpected side effects and concurrency bugs that may cross transaction or user boundaries. It’s a covert channel where code interacts without ever talking to each other. In languages without static analysis you cannot determine quickly which pieces of code talk in this fashion. It’s all secretly coupled instead of overtly coupled. You only learn by vast experience, and in the interim you make mistakes, which makes the oldest team members appear capable and the newest unworthy of trust. But it’s the people who tilted this playing field that you can’t trust. In a word: toxic.
Done right, memoization shows up clearly in your sequence diagrams, near the heart of your architecture. The top level of the code knows what’s going on, and orchestrates communication. People walking in off the street can figure out what the hell is happening, and be productive in short order.
It can often force you to think about when your system of record and your source of truth diverge. Usually I see people cache low quality precursor data for a decision, and then they have to cook it every time.
The thing I liked most about AngularJS was that you were meant to fetch all of your data fairly early in an interaction, mis-en-place style. If the data you got was a little garbage, you cooked it before any interface code ever saw it. The view just saw the nice version.
Doing so affords another architectural tool. All of that cleanup code can be moved to the backend or the database in a single refactoring, getting it out of the client. And the overt coupling makes you contend with the fact that a piece of code talks to too many hints to get its job done. It’s a mirror some do t want to look in.
The problem is, all of this involves making decisions, and a lot of developers either never learned, or learned to distrust their decisions. And rather than finding way to mitigate a bad decision, far too many of us have instead spent years or decades learning how never to make a decision at all. We’d be a lot better off with strong opinions loosely held.