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Just like Perl. Most people prefer dumb verbose code, not smart terse.
by deepsun 4y ago
Just like Perl. Most people prefer dumb verbose code, not smart terse.
- bobbylarrybobby 4y agoMost people prefer legible code, not hieroglyphics
- scubbo 4y ago(Honest question) what do you feel that your comment added to the one above it? Are you suggesting that "dumb verbose code" might not be legible (I suppose that's technically possible, but seems unlikely to happen by accident)? Or are you implying that Perl consists of "hieroglyphics" and so is not a suitable language for writing legible code? This, I think, would miss the point - deepsun was saying that, in both Perl and in awk, readers prefer legible code over cleverness - to claim that Perl cannot be legible at _all_ requires a little more justification, and would probably be disputed on the grounds that familiarity with a language's conventions is often a prerequisite for legibility.
- cerved 4y agonot OP but perhaps they are trying to say that terse code can be quite illegible I've written sed sripts and more compilated regular expressions that when I come back I don't remember what all that mess was supposed to accomplish
- dijonman2 4y agoI think it’s additive. We like to feel smart and can over complicate things. I much prefer a boring non-trendy approach that’s easy to maintain over new hotness every time.
- bobbylarrybobby 4y agoYes, I was basically saying that terse code is often unreadable due to the terseness coming from what amounts to a weird compression algorithm that can satisfy a compiler but buries information for humans in weird syntax instead of something resembling English.
- yakubin 4y agoThe question I prefer to ask is “how much functionality can I comprehend in a given amount of time” rather than “how many lines of code can I comprehend in a given amount of time”.