4 ms·

> one exception a colleague of someone on a discussion board had once You're not even trying to have a reasonable discussion about this, are you. At least thi

> one exception a colleague of someone on a discussion board had once You're not even trying to have a reasonable discussion about this, are you. At least this guy has a datapoint. You just have a hunch that you can write code faster if it's formatted slightly differently. I don't think it's true -- I don't think typing semicolons and curly braces slows down my coding enough to warrant omitting them. Most of my time coding is spent thinking and reading, probably less than 15% of my time is spent typing. So if I only type semicolons and commas 5% of that time, that means I'm saving 0.75% of my time by not typing them, which is about 14 hours a year if I work 40 hour weeks. I've definitely debugged a yaml error or two due solely to formatting in the past year, which probably cost me at least 4 hours of productivity. If my entire codebase was formatted solely by indents and returns, I imagine that number would balloon significantly, which is why I opt to use semicolons and other formatting characters. Also, they're not "reading impediments," at least not universally. Being able to use my code-editor to jump to the end of a code block (by matching a { or }) has been immensely useful in my experience.

mixmastamyk 7y ago
The detriment to readability of punctuation chars is documented. I write code all day in .py and .js and it is obvious which is easier to read. I won’t bother to mention .pl. If you need 4 hours to fix a yaml file, then what can I say? Perhaps you need better tools, or reduce tech debt.
- throwaway_pdp09 7y ago
  > The detriment to readability of punctuation chars is documented Not to my knowledge, and I have a great interest in UIs and usability, so a link would be very interesting. It would also help resolve a lot of whitespace vs. brackets debates if you can find it, thanks. > But there are more uncharitable interpretations That was nasty.
  - mixmastamyk 7y ago
    Lower case prose with plenty of whitespace and little punctuation is the easiest to read, and well known from the days of typesetting books and periodicals. Python is the closest to that of major langs. Taken to the other extreme you get perl to APL. Or perhaps programming with east-asian symbols. You're unlikely to find many peer-reviewed studies on this, the way you won't find many on proving other things learned centuries past.
    - throwaway_pdp09 7y ago
      "detriment to readability of punctuation chars is documented". Your words. So please produce.
      - mixmastamyk 7y ago
        I found these with google: - http://impact-information.com/impactinfo/readability02.pdf http://impact-information.com/impactinfo/readability02.pdf (about prose but mentions bullet points with space) - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320407173_A_COMPARITIVE_ANALYSIS_OF_THE_C_JAVA_AND_PYTHON_LANGUAGES https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320407173_A_COMPARI... - https://alistapart.com/article/whitespace/ https://alistapart.com/article/whitespace/ - https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/298564/ https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/2985... - https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8091188 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8091188 - https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ASE.2019.00047 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ASE.2019.00047 A quicker method however: Do you find regular expressions more readable than string methods? If so, you're highly unique. If not, you already agree.
        throwaway_pdp09 7y ago
        Really? I picked these two at random: "A COMPARITIVE ANALYSIS ..." They can't even spell it. "Project from course CS430 Principles of Programming Languages" - It's a school project. Whitespace is mentioned exactly twice. It has completely unverified asssertions such as "Easy-to-read: Python code is much more clearly defined and visible to the eyes". The rest of that list are pretty dumb too. That paper's worth nothing. It's literally schoolwork. and one I looked at is https://alistapart.com/article/whitespace/ https://alistapart.com/article/whitespace/ Whitespace is used there as a feature of graphics layout mainly (though text too, as margins, space between lines etc). From it “Whitespace,” or “negative space” is the space between elements in a composition Article's about using space around things. If this is about defending punctuation then it's not, and if it's about whitespace in the sense of left-indenting python, it's not either. As for the question about regexps, they aren't punctuation that punctuates anything else, they're a mini, dense string language. They reveal nothing about python spaces vs braces, and nothing about punctuation in an informal or formal language. To answer your question about regexps, which is clearer depends on what's required. A common emacs regex is to remove left-spaces from data: ^[ \t]+ -> (empty string here) To swap 2 fields separated by a space (assuming the 2 fields don't contain spaces, common in data scrubbing): \(.\) \(.\) -> \2 \1 In these cases regexps are cleaner than methods, but that I find it so neither supports nor denies agreement with you. This is silly. Good night.
- viklove 7y ago
  > If you need 4 hours to fix a yaml file Yes, recognizing a bug, investigating it, sourcing it to a yaml file, finding the offending line, fixing it and testing it, and getting the fix merged up probably took me a minimum of 2 hours, and I had to do it at least twice. You just handwave away every argument that is brought against you, without actually thinking about what you're saying or if it's even true. You're the worst type of engineer.
  - mixmastamyk 7y ago
    Yeah, the worst type, who has never faced/complained about/belabored whitespace issues in over twenty years. Because they are shown trivially in any editor. As opposed to the hysterical type who needs hours to fix a text file.

mixmastamyk 7y ago

The detriment to readability of punctuation chars is documented. I write code all day in .py and .js and it is obvious which is easier to read. I won’t bother to mention .pl. If you need 4 hours to fix a yaml file, then what can I say? Perhaps you need better tools, or reduce tech debt.

throwaway_pdp09 7y ago
> The detriment to readability of punctuation chars is documented Not to my knowledge, and I have a great interest in UIs and usability, so a link would be very interesting. It would also help resolve a lot of whitespace vs. brackets debates if you can find it, thanks. > But there are more uncharitable interpretations That was nasty.
- mixmastamyk 7y ago
  Lower case prose with plenty of whitespace and little punctuation is the easiest to read, and well known from the days of typesetting books and periodicals. Python is the closest to that of major langs. Taken to the other extreme you get perl to APL. Or perhaps programming with east-asian symbols. You're unlikely to find many peer-reviewed studies on this, the way you won't find many on proving other things learned centuries past.
  - throwaway_pdp09 7y ago
    "detriment to readability of punctuation chars is documented". Your words. So please produce.
    - mixmastamyk 7y ago
      I found these with google: - http://impact-information.com/impactinfo/readability02.pdf http://impact-information.com/impactinfo/readability02.pdf (about prose but mentions bullet points with space) - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320407173_A_COMPARITIVE_ANALYSIS_OF_THE_C_JAVA_AND_PYTHON_LANGUAGES https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320407173_A_COMPARI... - https://alistapart.com/article/whitespace/ https://alistapart.com/article/whitespace/ - https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/298564/ https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/2985... - https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8091188 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8091188 - https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ASE.2019.00047 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ASE.2019.00047 A quicker method however: Do you find regular expressions more readable than string methods? If so, you're highly unique. If not, you already agree.
      - throwaway_pdp09 7y ago
        Really? I picked these two at random: "A COMPARITIVE ANALYSIS ..." They can't even spell it. "Project from course CS430 Principles of Programming Languages" - It's a school project. Whitespace is mentioned exactly twice. It has completely unverified asssertions such as "Easy-to-read: Python code is much more clearly defined and visible to the eyes". The rest of that list are pretty dumb too. That paper's worth nothing. It's literally schoolwork. and one I looked at is https://alistapart.com/article/whitespace/ https://alistapart.com/article/whitespace/ Whitespace is used there as a feature of graphics layout mainly (though text too, as margins, space between lines etc). From it “Whitespace,” or “negative space” is the space between elements in a composition Article's about using space around things. If this is about defending punctuation then it's not, and if it's about whitespace in the sense of left-indenting python, it's not either. As for the question about regexps, they aren't punctuation that punctuates anything else, they're a mini, dense string language. They reveal nothing about python spaces vs braces, and nothing about punctuation in an informal or formal language. To answer your question about regexps, which is clearer depends on what's required. A common emacs regex is to remove left-spaces from data: ^[ \t]+ -> (empty string here) To swap 2 fields separated by a space (assuming the 2 fields don't contain spaces, common in data scrubbing): \(.\) \(.\) -> \2 \1 In these cases regexps are cleaner than methods, but that I find it so neither supports nor denies agreement with you. This is silly. Good night.
viklove 7y ago
> If you need 4 hours to fix a yaml file Yes, recognizing a bug, investigating it, sourcing it to a yaml file, finding the offending line, fixing it and testing it, and getting the fix merged up probably took me a minimum of 2 hours, and I had to do it at least twice. You just handwave away every argument that is brought against you, without actually thinking about what you're saying or if it's even true. You're the worst type of engineer.
- mixmastamyk 7y ago
  Yeah, the worst type, who has never faced/complained about/belabored whitespace issues in over twenty years. Because they are shown trivially in any editor. As opposed to the hysterical type who needs hours to fix a text file.