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I don't disagree, but I love contrarian opinions, and I'm reminded of a video I saw from a talk at an old RubyConf (I think). The talk was about beauty and aest

by mbrock 11y ago

I don't disagree, but I love contrarian opinions, and I'm reminded of a video I saw from a talk at an old RubyConf (I think). The talk was about beauty and aesthetics in code. It described some principles of beauty—simplicity, elegance, clarity, etc—and explained how these qualities also describe good code. But I loved that someone from the audience after the talk asked the question, what about more postmodern notions of beauty? Is there anything missing in this classical picture? It's just an interesting question. One way to start thinking about it is to consider the role of the author in both coding and postmodern texts: we can't really point to a clear notion of an author anymore. Who's the author of any given file in the Linux repository? There might be dozens of people involved. Maybe they together give rise to some emergent super-author, shaped by the code itself and its culture... Maybe different styles intersect and collide and create some kind of fruitful chaos. And so on. So one hypothesis is that classical beauty in code might lead to problems in cooperation. Like, this code is so perfect that I don't want to touch it. Or the literate elegance of this module intimidates me as a non-native speaker. Lots of interesting issues.

fsloth 11y ago
Focusing on just how the code looks is like concentrating on the paint job of a car and ignoring everything else. The deeper, more important concept, is that is the theory of the program understood and communicated lucidly through the code. I'm once more evoking Peter Naur's "Programming as theory building" http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf "Maybe different styles intersect and collide and create some kind of fruitful chaos. And so on." No, coding is not an art where noise synthesis produces reasonable results.
douche 11y ago
Who's the author? Run git/svn blame
LukeShu 11y ago
> Like, this code is so perfect that I don't want to touch it. And the paradox: You want the code to be simple and neat, to make it easy for others to contribute. But, you have to be very strict with accepting contributions to keep it that way... so it's not so easy for them to contribute.

by mbrock 11y ago

fsloth 11y ago

Focusing on just how the code looks is like concentrating on the paint job of a car and ignoring everything else. The deeper, more important concept, is that is the theory of the program understood and communicated lucidly through the code. I'm once more evoking Peter Naur's "Programming as theory building" http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf "Maybe different styles intersect and collide and create some kind of fruitful chaos. And so on." No, coding is not an art where noise synthesis produces reasonable results.

douche 11y ago

Who's the author? Run git/svn blame

LukeShu 11y ago

> Like, this code is so perfect that I don't want to touch it. And the paradox: You want the code to be simple and neat, to make it easy for others to contribute. But, you have to be very strict with accepting contributions to keep it that way... so it's not so easy for them to contribute.