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See this infamous discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/6l2esd/d_why_cant_you_guys_comment_your_fucking_code/ https://www.reddit.com/r/M

See this infamous discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/6l2esd/d_why_cant_you_guys_comment_your_fucking_code/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/6l2esd/d_w... Tldr: They view software as just a tool and don't see how they'll benefit from following best practices.

saghm 4y ago
Oh wow, looking at that Python code they linked to brings back memories of my ML course in college. We had skeleton code given to us to fill in for the assignments, and often times it took longer for me to understand what the code they gave was even doing so I'd know what to fill in than it took me to actually write the code. Occasionally there would be random semicolons at the end of the lines, but the author seemed to understand that wasn't necessary in Python since they weren't on most lines, so I guess they were just careless. They also used a very amusing "OO" pattern where they would pass in every input needed to the constructor of objects, then have one method pass all of those instance variables directly into other methods which ignored the fact that they had a `self` parameter and just used the copies of the instance variables (with the same names) passed in as parameters. The biggest confusion I ever had was in one method where they used the typical `n, d = matrix.dimensions` (I can't remember the exact incantation, but it was used in all the code to store the dimensions in `n` and `d`, immediately followed by `d = d + 1`, which I took to assume that the leftmost column of the matrix was just filled with 1s and wasn't needed (which happened in some of the algorithms), but then down in the implementation of the algorithm, the only time `d` was used was as `d - 1`. Because I had mentally skipped over the boilerplate at the top of the function, I spent a decent amount of time trying to figure out why they had subtracted 1 from d until I finally saw the increment above. To this day, I still struggle to decide if the author legitimately did not notice this and just used `d - 1` to try to fix a problem that they didn't know the source of, or if they knew and thought that it was a reasonable way to implement things, and I'm also still conflicted about which would be worse.
- wombatpm 4y ago
  You can write FORTRAN code in many languages
hoseja 4y ago
Good craftsmen care for their "just tools", this is delinquency.

saghm 4y ago

Oh wow, looking at that Python code they linked to brings back memories of my ML course in college. We had skeleton code given to us to fill in for the assignments, and often times it took longer for me to understand what the code they gave was even doing so I'd know what to fill in than it took me to actually write the code. Occasionally there would be random semicolons at the end of the lines, but the author seemed to understand that wasn't necessary in Python since they weren't on most lines, so I guess they were just careless. They also used a very amusing "OO" pattern where they would pass in every input needed to the constructor of objects, then have one method pass all of those instance variables directly into other methods which ignored the fact that they had a `self` parameter and just used the copies of the instance variables (with the same names) passed in as parameters. The biggest confusion I ever had was in one method where they used the typical `n, d = matrix.dimensions` (I can't remember the exact incantation, but it was used in all the code to store the dimensions in `n` and `d`, immediately followed by `d = d + 1`, which I took to assume that the leftmost column of the matrix was just filled with 1s and wasn't needed (which happened in some of the algorithms), but then down in the implementation of the algorithm, the only time `d` was used was as `d - 1`. Because I had mentally skipped over the boilerplate at the top of the function, I spent a decent amount of time trying to figure out why they had subtracted 1 from d until I finally saw the increment above. To this day, I still struggle to decide if the author legitimately did not notice this and just used `d - 1` to try to fix a problem that they didn't know the source of, or if they knew and thought that it was a reasonable way to implement things, and I'm also still conflicted about which would be worse.

wombatpm 4y ago
You can write FORTRAN code in many languages

hoseja 4y ago

Good craftsmen care for their "just tools", this is delinquency.