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> But of course aesthetics is subjective. (The term "subjective" here means what looks good to you might not look good to me, and vice versa.) Bullshit. There'

> But of course aesthetics is subjective. (The term "subjective" here means what looks good to you might not look good to me, and vice versa.) Bullshit. There's so much that objectively deficient about that piece of code that I'm having trouble taking you seriously. If that comes at all close to being a representative sample of someone trying to make clear, readable code in that language, then the language was clearly deliberately designed to have an excess of visual noise. But I suspect you're not actually trying to make that code look as clean as the language allows. The semicolons serve no apparent purpose. Having labels like x01 and x01a with no functional relationship between those lines is outright hostile to the reader. Using x as the prefix for almost all of your label names and as one of your variables is mildly confusing, especially when most of those lines don't relate to the variable x and don't appear to need labels at all. "output" seems to be a magic variable for which assignment has side effects, but nothing in the syntax differentiates it from any other variable. Grouping all the conditionals together, then grouping all their consequences together forces the reader to jump back and forth between lines more than if you put the consequence of each conditional immediately after the corresponding test (in this instance, your way does have the advantage of making the conditional fall-through pattern more readily apparent, but on the other hand that wouldn't be as necessary if you could use more than one line of code to write a single line of output). You can claim all you want that aesthetics is subjective, but at the very least you must recognize that visual noise you've trained yourself to ignore is objectively different from code which doesn't have those distractions in the first place.

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
"output" is a keyword, cannot change it (I guess one could recompile the interpreter and define it as something else) semicolons separate statements. Dont like them at the beginning, move them to the end. Dont like the label names. Rename them to whatever suits you. The thing that you may be misunderstanding is that this is written for me, not you. It is written to please my sense of aesthetics, not yours. I am not employed to write programs for other users or to be read by programmers. Every user is different. You probably could not write a program I would use. I would find "deficiencies" and reject it for something else. If programming is objective then why are there thousands of different languages, and the number is constantly increasing. All of them are basically doing the same things. Honest question. Why are there so many different languages. Whats behind that.
- pracer 5y ago
  "I am not employed to write programs for other users or to be read by programmers. Every user is different." Well, unless you are the only programmer that company will ever has, you should write code that others can read and understand. Or if you are working in academia, then you can write as you like, but as a professional, you should write readable code for those coming after you.
  - hnlmorg 5y ago
    Devils advocate: GP might work for a company working on a niche application (be it software or hardware) that requires code to be written like the aforementioned and anyone who specialises in that field is already adept in reading and writing code like that. I'm not going to defend that choice of programming style for everywhere but software development is a broad industry where you do get pockets of people working on code that looks totally alien to others who are used to see C or ALGOL derived languages. Take LISP for example, there is LISP code in half of all European TVs shipped in the 90s. Forth is used in loads of places, even FreeBSD's bootloader is written in Forth. Machine code is almost completely unreadable for humans yet a massive chunk of software in the 80s was written using it. My point is the industry might have standardised on a subset of syntax styles that seem readable to the lowest common denominator of developers but it's a massive industry with developers using all sorts of exotic languages effectively. Let's not go down the rabbit hole of saying they're doing it wrong because their code looks alien to you before you've understood the field in which that code is running in.
    - laumars 5y ago
      You’re losing karma for this but you’re right. It’s a massive industry and there are specialties out there writing code in languages that would look unreadable to your average web developer yet the code is well written and perfectly readable to those in the same specialty. Sometimes I wonder if the only people who browse this site are JavaScript monkeys and Rust fanboys. There’s a whole spectrum of languages out there that looks nothing like C.
  - deleted 5y ago
hnlmorg 5y ago
> Bullshit. There's so much that objectively deficient about that piece of code I don't agree the GPs code is more aesthetically pleasing but he's right that it is subjective. All the counterarguments you've given are subjective to you (eg you know what tokens do in over languages, spent zero time learning the tokens of this language and thus you're clearly not going to know what a colon does in this language just by looking at it). One of the hardest things it seems for a developer to do is accept that their personal opinions are subjective since they spend so much of their career being told there's a correct way of doing things. Your post here is a classic example of that. Arguments about strongly typed and loosely typed languages are another. Debates about functional, stack backed, object orientated, procedural, etc etc... it's all just people like yourself trying to convince others that your subjective view is empirical scientific fact. But it's not, it's just opinions. Some opinions just happen to be more popular.
- wtallis 5y ago
  > All the counterarguments you've given are subjective to you (eg you know what tokens do in over languages, spent zero time learning the tokens of this language and thus you're clearly not going to know what a colon does in this language just by looking at it). I tried very hard to only bring up problems that were at least somewhat objective. Counting the number of superfluous symbols in the code is not purely subjective. Noting the similarity between "x01" and "x01a" is not purely subjective. Measuring the distance between a conditional test and its consequences is not purely subjective. And I did figure out what a colon does in this language just by inspecting this code. It's semicolons that serve no apparent purpose in this snippet, and even with the outside knowledge that they serve the same statement separator purpose as in C and many other languages, it's still an objective fact that they are largely redundant. The character count could have been a lot lower if the language made it the default for new lines to start new statements and used a special character for continuing a statement on another line. Subjective would have been if I complained about the semicolons being at the beginning of the line instead of at the end. That's almost purely a matter of taste driven by prior experience with other languages.
  - laumars 5y ago

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

"output" is a keyword, cannot change it (I guess one could recompile the interpreter and define it as something else) semicolons separate statements. Dont like them at the beginning, move them to the end. Dont like the label names. Rename them to whatever suits you. The thing that you may be misunderstanding is that this is written for me, not you. It is written to please my sense of aesthetics, not yours. I am not employed to write programs for other users or to be read by programmers. Every user is different. You probably could not write a program I would use. I would find "deficiencies" and reject it for something else. If programming is objective then why are there thousands of different languages, and the number is constantly increasing. All of them are basically doing the same things. Honest question. Why are there so many different languages. Whats behind that.

pracer 5y ago
"I am not employed to write programs for other users or to be read by programmers. Every user is different." Well, unless you are the only programmer that company will ever has, you should write code that others can read and understand. Or if you are working in academia, then you can write as you like, but as a professional, you should write readable code for those coming after you.
- hnlmorg 5y ago
  Devils advocate: GP might work for a company working on a niche application (be it software or hardware) that requires code to be written like the aforementioned and anyone who specialises in that field is already adept in reading and writing code like that. I'm not going to defend that choice of programming style for everywhere but software development is a broad industry where you do get pockets of people working on code that looks totally alien to others who are used to see C or ALGOL derived languages. Take LISP for example, there is LISP code in half of all European TVs shipped in the 90s. Forth is used in loads of places, even FreeBSD's bootloader is written in Forth. Machine code is almost completely unreadable for humans yet a massive chunk of software in the 80s was written using it. My point is the industry might have standardised on a subset of syntax styles that seem readable to the lowest common denominator of developers but it's a massive industry with developers using all sorts of exotic languages effectively. Let's not go down the rabbit hole of saying they're doing it wrong because their code looks alien to you before you've understood the field in which that code is running in.
  - laumars 5y ago
    You’re losing karma for this but you’re right. It’s a massive industry and there are specialties out there writing code in languages that would look unreadable to your average web developer yet the code is well written and perfectly readable to those in the same specialty. Sometimes I wonder if the only people who browse this site are JavaScript monkeys and Rust fanboys. There’s a whole spectrum of languages out there that looks nothing like C.
- deleted 5y ago

hnlmorg 5y ago

> Bullshit. There's so much that objectively deficient about that piece of code I don't agree the GPs code is more aesthetically pleasing but he's right that it is subjective. All the counterarguments you've given are subjective to you (eg you know what tokens do in over languages, spent zero time learning the tokens of this language and thus you're clearly not going to know what a colon does in this language just by looking at it). One of the hardest things it seems for a developer to do is accept that their personal opinions are subjective since they spend so much of their career being told there's a correct way of doing things. Your post here is a classic example of that. Arguments about strongly typed and loosely typed languages are another. Debates about functional, stack backed, object orientated, procedural, etc etc... it's all just people like yourself trying to convince others that your subjective view is empirical scientific fact. But it's not, it's just opinions. Some opinions just happen to be more popular.

wtallis 5y ago
> All the counterarguments you've given are subjective to you (eg you know what tokens do in over languages, spent zero time learning the tokens of this language and thus you're clearly not going to know what a colon does in this language just by looking at it). I tried very hard to only bring up problems that were at least somewhat objective. Counting the number of superfluous symbols in the code is not purely subjective. Noting the similarity between "x01" and "x01a" is not purely subjective. Measuring the distance between a conditional test and its consequences is not purely subjective. And I did figure out what a colon does in this language just by inspecting this code. It's semicolons that serve no apparent purpose in this snippet, and even with the outside knowledge that they serve the same statement separator purpose as in C and many other languages, it's still an objective fact that they are largely redundant. The character count could have been a lot lower if the language made it the default for new lines to start new statements and used a special character for continuing a statement on another line. Subjective would have been if I complained about the semicolons being at the beginning of the line instead of at the end. That's almost purely a matter of taste driven by prior experience with other languages.
- laumars 5y ago