4 ms·

Give me a break with your "elegance". No matter how you twist it, it's subjective unless you provide some actual metrics. Once you do that, you might notice it'

Give me a break with your "elegance". No matter how you twist it, it's subjective unless you provide some actual metrics. Once you do that, you might notice it's not "elegance" any more, it's something else.

staltz 11y ago
What metrics do you suggest?
- kyberias 11y ago
  It's YOUR challenge! :)
  - finance-geek 11y ago
    I don't think the poster is challenging you, he is asking you for guidance in case you know of better approaches.
lighthawk 11y ago
He describes elegance as: "the ability of a programmer to easily understand the program's flow and state coordination, being completely familiar with the tools used but completely unfamiliar with the codebase." You're right that it is not something easily measurable. The product of code golf is measurable. But, code golf is not usually what you want in production code. Performance is not about characters/lines of code and neither is clarity or maintainability, necessarily. I don't think there is anything wrong with this sort of requirement. He stated there are no winners. Elegance could really be decided by the community. Just try to write concise but clear code that would be easily understood by most who are well-experienced in the language/framework.
Retozi 11y ago
Does it matter though? As of today, it is incredibly hard to evaluate frameworks because you generally only have the time to evaluate small examples, but those are usually easy to do anyways. This thing here is as tricky as it gets for the scope. Even if the judging is subjective, it is highly revealing.
cnp 11y ago
I think that after a certain point in time in ones coding life it becomes fairly easy to determine the elegance of a small codebase. This is a reasonable ask.
- nostrademons 11y ago
  Yes, except that that determination will be specific to the person doing the determination. That's the definition of "subjective". Try submitting the same code to the IOCCC [1], the ICFP programming contest [2], the computer language benchmarks game [3], and the Flux Challenge (well, assuming they had the same problem statement, and that you could emscripten your C code for the Flux Challenge). They all have prizes for elegance. The only one of their definitions of elegance that is objective is the benchmarks game, which defines it as straight lines of code (and has resulted in some entries that most programmers consider to be abominations "winning"). It's different cultures, different judges, and different criteria for what's elegant. [1] http://www.ioccc.org/ http://www.ioccc.org/ [2] http://icfpcontest.org/ http://icfpcontest.org/ [3] http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/ http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/
  - cnp 11y ago
    Sorry, but I think the authors ask is clear, simple and unambiguous. Your comment above strikes me as unnecessarily pedantic when paired with the challenge.
roflc0ptic 11y ago
Metrics are subjective, too! What metrics do you choose? How do you value them? How do you interpret them? Computers especially but science generally lead people to favor the quantifiable to a pathological degree. Software development, like most other complex endeavors, is stubbornly resistant to predictive quantification. It's also easy to criticize other people's work, but it's a lazy path to being right. There are an infinite number of ways in which something can be considered inadequate or a failure. The number of ways in which a something is good or useful is much smaller. Find the terms on which it's trying to succeed and criticize it there, if you have to criticize something. But introducing your own yardstick and saying "you failed!" is cheap.
baddox 11y ago
It sounds like the author is just saying that the definition of elegance is not subjective in this context. The author defines it. Obviously the author's definition contains subjective elements, like who counts as a programmer, who counts as "familiar with the tools used," etc., but I don't think the author is implying that there is a completely objective way to assign a score to each submission.

staltz 11y ago

What metrics do you suggest?

kyberias 11y ago
It's YOUR challenge! :)
- finance-geek 11y ago
  I don't think the poster is challenging you, he is asking you for guidance in case you know of better approaches.

lighthawk 11y ago

He describes elegance as: "the ability of a programmer to easily understand the program's flow and state coordination, being completely familiar with the tools used but completely unfamiliar with the codebase." You're right that it is not something easily measurable. The product of code golf is measurable. But, code golf is not usually what you want in production code. Performance is not about characters/lines of code and neither is clarity or maintainability, necessarily. I don't think there is anything wrong with this sort of requirement. He stated there are no winners. Elegance could really be decided by the community. Just try to write concise but clear code that would be easily understood by most who are well-experienced in the language/framework.

Retozi 11y ago

Does it matter though? As of today, it is incredibly hard to evaluate frameworks because you generally only have the time to evaluate small examples, but those are usually easy to do anyways. This thing here is as tricky as it gets for the scope. Even if the judging is subjective, it is highly revealing.

cnp 11y ago

I think that after a certain point in time in ones coding life it becomes fairly easy to determine the elegance of a small codebase. This is a reasonable ask.

nostrademons 11y ago
Yes, except that that determination will be specific to the person doing the determination. That's the definition of "subjective". Try submitting the same code to the IOCCC [1], the ICFP programming contest [2], the computer language benchmarks game [3], and the Flux Challenge (well, assuming they had the same problem statement, and that you could emscripten your C code for the Flux Challenge). They all have prizes for elegance. The only one of their definitions of elegance that is objective is the benchmarks game, which defines it as straight lines of code (and has resulted in some entries that most programmers consider to be abominations "winning"). It's different cultures, different judges, and different criteria for what's elegant. [1] http://www.ioccc.org/ http://www.ioccc.org/ [2] http://icfpcontest.org/ http://icfpcontest.org/ [3] http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/ http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/
- cnp 11y ago
  Sorry, but I think the authors ask is clear, simple and unambiguous. Your comment above strikes me as unnecessarily pedantic when paired with the challenge.

roflc0ptic 11y ago

Metrics are subjective, too! What metrics do you choose? How do you value them? How do you interpret them? Computers especially but science generally lead people to favor the quantifiable to a pathological degree. Software development, like most other complex endeavors, is stubbornly resistant to predictive quantification. It's also easy to criticize other people's work, but it's a lazy path to being right. There are an infinite number of ways in which something can be considered inadequate or a failure. The number of ways in which a something is good or useful is much smaller. Find the terms on which it's trying to succeed and criticize it there, if you have to criticize something. But introducing your own yardstick and saying "you failed!" is cheap.

baddox 11y ago

It sounds like the author is just saying that the definition of elegance is not subjective in this context. The author defines it. Obviously the author's definition contains subjective elements, like who counts as a programmer, who counts as "familiar with the tools used," etc., but I don't think the author is implying that there is a completely objective way to assign a score to each submission.