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Code Complete has some of my favorite quotes on programming. “The visual and intellectual enjoyment of well-formatted code is a pleasure that few nonprogramm
by CharlieDigital 4y ago
Code Complete has some of my favorite quotes on programming.
“The visual and intellectual enjoyment of well-formatted code is a pleasure that few nonprogrammers can appreciate. But programmers who take pride in their work derive great artistic satisfaction from polishing the visual structure of their code.”
“…there is a psychological basis for writing programs in a conventional manner: programmers have strong expectations that other programmers will follow these discourse rules. If the rules are violated, then the utility afforded by the expectations that programmers have built up over time is effectively nullified.”
“The smaller part of the job of programming is writing a program so that the computer can read it; the larger part is writing it so that other humans can read it.”
“The information contained in a program is denser than the information contained in most books. Whereas you might read and understand a page of a book in a minute or two, most programmers can’t read and understand a naked program listing at anything close to that rate. A program should give more organizational clues than a book, not fewer.”
- digdugdirk 4y agoExcellent quotes, and certainly inspired me to put Code Complete on the reading list. Out of curiosity - how did these quotes come to mind/hand so quickly? What's your notetaking process look like? How do you keep it all organized?
- CharlieDigital 4y agoI freely highlight and take notes in my books, but also, I keep a blog and a Medium :)
- swyx 4y agopeople always want to know a big secret that will unlock the second brain, when really we know the answer and the hard part is doing the thing day in and day out haha
- j1elo 4y agoI always liked the feeling of looking at a well-formatted piece of code. But discussions about formatting always ensued with coworkers. Lately, I've been deriving immense satisfaction from pressing Ctrl+Shift+I inside VSCode, and having Prettier format absolutely everything, with its sensible default settings and no leeway for discussion. It feels good.
- neves 4y agoI'm in love of Black formatter for python code: it leaves almost no option for formatting preferences. Format on save and you are done. It clears mental cycles for the important problems and make formatting discussions a thing of the past.
- vonseel 4y agoSame, also isort. I don’t think about it anymore unless for some reason my file watcher isn’t running.
- amelius 4y ago> “The visual and intellectual enjoyment of well-formatted code is a pleasure that few nonprogrammers can appreciate. But programmers who take pride in their work derive great artistic satisfaction from polishing the visual structure of their code.” Except those who code in Whitespace. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_langua...
- renox 4y agoGiven that I know have to use clang-format, the 'intellectual enjoyment of well-formated code' is a thing of the past. This isn't a criticism of clang-format, just that as it is now a tool which does the formatting, I focus on other things..