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This is not really as subjective as you think. Research in software engineering shows that certain structures are more prone to errors than others. We know that

This is not really as subjective as you think. Research in software engineering shows that certain structures are more prone to errors than others. We know that higher cyclomatic complexity leads to more bugs, more statements lead to more bugs, and certain usage patterns lead to more bugs. Smart people can disagree, undoubtedly, but there's a reason why GOTO is considered to be brain cancer and pattern matching is generally considered to be great.

jghn 10y ago
Sure but I'm talking about things like "break things down into lots of small functions to make things more readable!" vs "keeping code together makes it easier to read!" or "make things verbose so it is easier to read!" vs "conciseness makes code easier to read!" On a lot of those I know what makes code easier for me to read. It's not the same as some of my coworkers. Based on some of your phrasing I suspect we'd agree on a lot of them, fwiw When the metric used is "easier to read" it becomes far too subjective IMO, things you mentioned are similar but not quite the same
- true_religion 10y ago
  It's a judgment call where small functiosn are more readable than cohesive code. If the 'idea' of the code isn't easily broken down into abstractions, even mentally speaking, then small functions will just obscure what's actually going on by pointing out all the implementation details that are wound together.
  - Daishiman 10y ago
    I think the point is that there's a wide range of styles that are readable, but the condition for readability is also related to the skills of the coder to clarify. And that range is ample but also finite.
- Daishiman 10y ago
  In my experience, very experienced programmers end up converging towards very similar idioms: terse expressions for common patterns, clarity when the domain is complex through verboseness if necessary, and just keeping things as simple as possible unless there's evidence that complexity will reduce technical debt in the future. I don't really see highly competent devs doing the whole J2EE architecture astronautics anymore, nor using single-char variable names. There's a tendency to write things concisely when simple, and then moving the complexity away to some other place, stashed in its own function, when it reaches a certain mental threshold of complexity. There's a tendency to use the best features languages have to offer, maximizing simplicity through orthogonal features and repeated idioms, while discarding unnecessary cruft; one of the marks of junior devs is their desire to try to fit problems into new idioms just to test out language features or strange design patterns. Given that human intelligence is fluid but the variance just isn't that high (after all, we all have a similar amount of working memory), common design practices emerge out of this understanding for our limits for reasoning about problems. Exceptions abound in extremely technical and complicated problems (just check out non-trivial linear algebra code or bit-flipping, low-level device drivers), but the most part it just sticks out how things are made to look simple within a finite range of tradeoffs. This has been my experience in my domain of expertise; look at most current web development frameworks and they respect common patterns even in radically different languages that are really about the essence of the request-response cycle, not made-up constructs of additional complexity or a restating of the problem.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    > I don't really see highly competent devs doing the whole J2EE architecture astronautics anymore Yes we do, because the customers and their in-house architects decide how it is going to be, not us.
  - brangalina4eva 10y ago
    > nor using single-char variable names My pet hate.
    - nrjdhsbsid 10y ago
joejev 10y ago
> but there's a reason why GOTO is considered to be brain cancer and pattern matching is generally considered to be great. Look at any large C codebase and you will see plenty of goto statements to manage resource cleanup. The problem is using goto in place of structured control flow like loops and if/else. Statements like yours make it seem like there is a conceptual problem with a jump.
- aninhumer 10y ago
  Sure there are some cases in C where you want a particular control flow that the language doesn't allow, and goto is the best solution in those cases. But all the examples of this that I've seen are still structured it's just that the language isn't able to express that structure. The most common examples are jumping out of nested loops (better solved by allowing named loops so you can use break/continue) or jumping immediately to error handling logic (better solved by exceptions, or even just simplistic try/throw/catch). I do think there's a conceptual problem with arbitrary jumps.

jghn 10y ago

Sure but I'm talking about things like "break things down into lots of small functions to make things more readable!" vs "keeping code together makes it easier to read!" or "make things verbose so it is easier to read!" vs "conciseness makes code easier to read!" On a lot of those I know what makes code easier for me to read. It's not the same as some of my coworkers. Based on some of your phrasing I suspect we'd agree on a lot of them, fwiw When the metric used is "easier to read" it becomes far too subjective IMO, things you mentioned are similar but not quite the same

true_religion 10y ago
It's a judgment call where small functiosn are more readable than cohesive code. If the 'idea' of the code isn't easily broken down into abstractions, even mentally speaking, then small functions will just obscure what's actually going on by pointing out all the implementation details that are wound together.
- Daishiman 10y ago
  I think the point is that there's a wide range of styles that are readable, but the condition for readability is also related to the skills of the coder to clarify. And that range is ample but also finite.
Daishiman 10y ago
In my experience, very experienced programmers end up converging towards very similar idioms: terse expressions for common patterns, clarity when the domain is complex through verboseness if necessary, and just keeping things as simple as possible unless there's evidence that complexity will reduce technical debt in the future. I don't really see highly competent devs doing the whole J2EE architecture astronautics anymore, nor using single-char variable names. There's a tendency to write things concisely when simple, and then moving the complexity away to some other place, stashed in its own function, when it reaches a certain mental threshold of complexity. There's a tendency to use the best features languages have to offer, maximizing simplicity through orthogonal features and repeated idioms, while discarding unnecessary cruft; one of the marks of junior devs is their desire to try to fit problems into new idioms just to test out language features or strange design patterns. Given that human intelligence is fluid but the variance just isn't that high (after all, we all have a similar amount of working memory), common design practices emerge out of this understanding for our limits for reasoning about problems. Exceptions abound in extremely technical and complicated problems (just check out non-trivial linear algebra code or bit-flipping, low-level device drivers), but the most part it just sticks out how things are made to look simple within a finite range of tradeoffs. This has been my experience in my domain of expertise; look at most current web development frameworks and they respect common patterns even in radically different languages that are really about the essence of the request-response cycle, not made-up constructs of additional complexity or a restating of the problem.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  > I don't really see highly competent devs doing the whole J2EE architecture astronautics anymore Yes we do, because the customers and their in-house architects decide how it is going to be, not us.
- brangalina4eva 10y ago
  > nor using single-char variable names My pet hate.
  - nrjdhsbsid 10y ago

joejev 10y ago

> but there's a reason why GOTO is considered to be brain cancer and pattern matching is generally considered to be great. Look at any large C codebase and you will see plenty of goto statements to manage resource cleanup. The problem is using goto in place of structured control flow like loops and if/else. Statements like yours make it seem like there is a conceptual problem with a jump.

aninhumer 10y ago
Sure there are some cases in C where you want a particular control flow that the language doesn't allow, and goto is the best solution in those cases. But all the examples of this that I've seen are still structured it's just that the language isn't able to express that structure. The most common examples are jumping out of nested loops (better solved by allowing named loops so you can use break/continue) or jumping immediately to error handling logic (better solved by exceptions, or even just simplistic try/throw/catch). I do think there's a conceptual problem with arbitrary jumps.