[InfinityByTen]

One of my professors in undergrad said: the most dangerous mathematicians are the ones that begin the proof with "Consider a case ...". He said that these mathematicians are the ones who don't share anything about how they got the case and they end up projecting this sort of "magician aura". I don't know how accurate that assessment it, but I think it captures something that never sat well with me.

In my life, I've never liked people who deliberately polish up their articulation to the level that it obfuscates how they arrived at that understanding (whether it's academics or engineers). They might not do it for attention and they might not be doing it knowingly. IMO, they are taking away the opportunity of learning from the people they are talking to. For me the conversation is one sided. I'm there to listen, but rarely can I ask questions, give feedback or grow from where they have possibly reached.

[ozim]

Ugh, let's take a step back and make a distinction:

I don't need your fluff. No one cares how you arrived writing another crud line to save an object to database or sent yet another AJAX call.

If you wrote some genuine great compression algorithm that's a different take on compression, I would like to see step by step reasoning and eventual dead ends.

[InfinityByTen]

I shared my thoughts in the context of someone saying that one should be able to share your line of thinking when asked to. Whether "when one asked to" applies to keystroke by keystroke blockhained versioning isn't my point of discussion.

I get it, that the overall discussion is about DeltaDB. I'd say interesting concept to toy with. I'd pay more attention to "micro commits" as the idea more than the keylogger.

[8note]

why this particular object though?

why didn't you add these three other parameters to it?

how does this default value make sense when unset?

mostly things that end up not-in-the-commit that 3 years from now people are gonna wonder about is really handy to know

[jimbokun]

I strongly doubt that.

[hinkley]

I think a good argument ad absurdum for this is to look at how some recipe sites give the entire genealogical history of the author and an anecdote about how their gammy met Theodore Roosevelt and he stole her pen. Three pages later I discover I need to go to the grocery store because the recipe requires sour cream. And the store is closed so I need a different recipe.

Don't fucking do that. Do something way less than halfway to that line.

[jimbokun]

Agree on the software case. Disagree about the recipes.

Food writing is its own genre where the recipe is one part of a larger story. Can often include travel stories as well.

Maybe not your thing. But definitely has its place.

[hinkley]

Can we agree that recipe writing should not be applied to software? That's the point I was going for (hence the ad absurdum header)

[hinkley]

"So I was thinking about #####'s Law this morning, and I realized that #######'s Theorem might apply if we do this and ignore that. Then I went up a blind alley and stopped for coffee and realized I was overcomplicating it, we don't care about negative or imaginary solutions."

They don't need to know I was brushing my teeth and thinking of bacon and an argument I had with my spouse right before I thought that though. Or how rude the customer in front of me was to the new barista who was just trying her best.

[rdedev]

The example I had was of Ramanujam. "It was revealed to me in a dream"

[hinkley]

I love that man, and I hate that man. For many of the reasons already listed in this thread. He is smarter than Feynman, but also dumber than Feynman.

[ablob]

I personally stumble upon many topics where I only care about the what. In that case all the theory is just a distraction I'm just wading through to get to the point. If it's optional, then looking into the how and why is certainly nice, but it should be part of an appendix or a commentary and not interspersed within the proof unless an uncommented version exists.

[jcgrillo]

OTOH polishing up the presentation can really improve the experience of a first-time reader of the work (e.g. your code reviewers). If the polishing is done with good intent and proficiency you can make something that was very convoluted and difficult to arrive at digestible with far less effort. It also aids your own understanding: "If we can reduce it to the freshman level that means we really understand it" (or similar I didn't look up the exact quote, attributed to Feynman). If you're polishing something up to make it understandable that's totally different than polishing it up to make yourself seem smart, right?