4 ms·

David Baker's Rosetta code, which made him a pile of money, is IMO a spectacular example of craptastic C++ written by people who really didn't understand C++ bu

David Baker's Rosetta code, which made him a pile of money, is IMO a spectacular example of craptastic C++ written by people who really didn't understand C++ but didn't let that deter them from using every single feature of the language, badly. Some years back we tried to port it to CUDA but there were so many levels of indirection, dereferencing, and virtual functions that it was nearly impossible to make any progress. In contrast, porting the 30+ year old molecular Dynamics package AMBER to CUDA took about 3 months and probably established me as a CUDA expert. In my opinion its well-maintained Fortran 90 code was far easier to understand and refactor. While my primary languages today are C++ and CUDA, there is something clean about Fortran when it comes to understanding underlying algorithms. I have a similar opinion about well written C code.

jacquesm 9y ago
That's the whole trick. Good code makes complex stuff look simple. Bad code makes simple stuff look complex.
- derefr 9y ago
  I wonder if you can formalize this. Assume TDD, and then measure the compressed size of the codebase vs. the compressed size of the test suite. Code is "worse" when it requires more "stuff" (informational entropy) to do less "stuff" (pass test cases.) The compression would presumably remove the redundancy of the language itself as a factor (including differences in idiomatic cyclomatic-complexity "depths" of various stdlibs), and also remove any redundancy in the way the test cases were specified. So it'd be down to a measure of how much circumlocution and over-engineering you did in the process of implementing the solution. I'd worry slightly that code-golf solutions would be rewarded, though. Maybe pass everything through an obfuscator + linter before computing the metric, so that things like identifier lengths and spaces aren't considered.
- aswanson 9y ago
  That quote should be the metric by which code/languages are judged.
  - S4M 9y ago
    How do you measure the complexity of the code, and most importantly, of the problem that the code is solving?
    - aswanson 9y ago
      Complexity analysis.
WalterBright 9y ago
> using every single feature of the language I constantly run into code where someone takes an obscure corner case in the language, and builds an entire edifice around it.
kowdermeister 9y ago
> which made him a pile of money May I ask how? I don't see ads or any other obvious monetization channels.
- fnord123 9y ago
  Rosetta is a protein folding bit of software: https://els.comotion.uw.edu/express_license_technologies/rosetta https://els.comotion.uw.edu/express_license_technologies/ros... GP is not talking about http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Rosetta_Code http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Rosetta_Code
  - StudentStuff 9y ago
    Its a product of the UW, so no surprise the quality is crap. IMO their Cybersecurity course (which is mandatory for CS students) is the biggest load of shit I've ever seen in a class. The head of information security at the UW calls the PSTN bulletproof secure, but VOIP insecure, then babbles on about how he shares classified info with his buddies casually (happens to be a felony to share said info). Needless to say, UW's Avaya phone system barebacks the internet, with no regard for using silly security things like TLS or SRTP.
runiq 9y ago
Oh, you're that Scott Grand? Allow me to thank you for the work you did on pmemd.cuda, my old research group wouldn't be where they are now without you.
- scottlegrand2 9y ago
  You're welcome, it was ironically based on ideas drawn from a C Port of the Amber potential function I wrote back in grad school. While I'm not proud of the code these days, I put it on sourceforge a long time ago. https://sourceforge.net/projects/folderol/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/folderol/ Why write the port in the first place? Because back in the days of yore, I was doing the equivalent of adversarial search to try and design a better potential function for predicting protein tertiary structure. I ultimately arrived at the result that there were too many adversaries to make linear models and single hidden layer neural networks work. And unfortunately, my postdoctoral advisor at the time didn't consider this publishable research.
ajuc 9y ago
Maybe it's simply the fact that the C++ code was object-oriented? OO allows you to make a much worse mess than procedural programming in my experience.

jacquesm 9y ago

That's the whole trick. Good code makes complex stuff look simple. Bad code makes simple stuff look complex.

derefr 9y ago
I wonder if you can formalize this. Assume TDD, and then measure the compressed size of the codebase vs. the compressed size of the test suite. Code is "worse" when it requires more "stuff" (informational entropy) to do less "stuff" (pass test cases.) The compression would presumably remove the redundancy of the language itself as a factor (including differences in idiomatic cyclomatic-complexity "depths" of various stdlibs), and also remove any redundancy in the way the test cases were specified. So it'd be down to a measure of how much circumlocution and over-engineering you did in the process of implementing the solution. I'd worry slightly that code-golf solutions would be rewarded, though. Maybe pass everything through an obfuscator + linter before computing the metric, so that things like identifier lengths and spaces aren't considered.
aswanson 9y ago
That quote should be the metric by which code/languages are judged.
- S4M 9y ago
  How do you measure the complexity of the code, and most importantly, of the problem that the code is solving?
  - aswanson 9y ago
    Complexity analysis.

WalterBright 9y ago

> using every single feature of the language I constantly run into code where someone takes an obscure corner case in the language, and builds an entire edifice around it.

kowdermeister 9y ago

> which made him a pile of money May I ask how? I don't see ads or any other obvious monetization channels.

fnord123 9y ago
Rosetta is a protein folding bit of software: https://els.comotion.uw.edu/express_license_technologies/rosetta https://els.comotion.uw.edu/express_license_technologies/ros... GP is not talking about http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Rosetta_Code http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Rosetta_Code
- StudentStuff 9y ago
  Its a product of the UW, so no surprise the quality is crap. IMO their Cybersecurity course (which is mandatory for CS students) is the biggest load of shit I've ever seen in a class. The head of information security at the UW calls the PSTN bulletproof secure, but VOIP insecure, then babbles on about how he shares classified info with his buddies casually (happens to be a felony to share said info). Needless to say, UW's Avaya phone system barebacks the internet, with no regard for using silly security things like TLS or SRTP.

runiq 9y ago

Oh, you're that Scott Grand? Allow me to thank you for the work you did on pmemd.cuda, my old research group wouldn't be where they are now without you.

scottlegrand2 9y ago
You're welcome, it was ironically based on ideas drawn from a C Port of the Amber potential function I wrote back in grad school. While I'm not proud of the code these days, I put it on sourceforge a long time ago. https://sourceforge.net/projects/folderol/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/folderol/ Why write the port in the first place? Because back in the days of yore, I was doing the equivalent of adversarial search to try and design a better potential function for predicting protein tertiary structure. I ultimately arrived at the result that there were too many adversaries to make linear models and single hidden layer neural networks work. And unfortunately, my postdoctoral advisor at the time didn't consider this publishable research.

ajuc 9y ago

Maybe it's simply the fact that the C++ code was object-oriented? OO allows you to make a much worse mess than procedural programming in my experience.