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I admit that it took me having to look at "clever" short code that I wrote years ago to really take this lesson home. Now I get that code has to not only be cor

by tensor 4y ago

I admit that it took me having to look at "clever" short code that I wrote years ago to really take this lesson home. Now I get that code has to not only be correct and concise, but also it needs to document to the reader it's function. That often means being more verbose than it could be, and being broken into obvious discrete steps.

andirk 4y ago
"It reads like newspaper" a man once told me about jQuery. A great compliment to that code and something I stive for with each new line!
elcritch 4y ago
Certainly the best code is simple and easy to read, and yet still concise. But even "clever" code can be better than truly bad code. I'd wager that those of us that frequent HN probably see less of the sort of truly bad code though since it is usually the code written at lower paying jobs and fields, but which possibly makes up more LOC than all the "ok" code.
marginalia_nu 4y ago
On the flip side, there's code that will never be easy to read. Many algorithms and data structures simply don't break down to anything that is easy to comprehend. Like even something as freshman as mergesort falls in this category where you're sort of squinting and wincing trying to figure out how p, q and w relates to i, j, i0 and j0. Sure you can say let the PhD students write that code and put it in a library and we'll just worry about `sort(array, start, end)`, but that's just sweeping this reality under the rug. Truth is if you're not willing to venture into this territory of non-trivial algorithms once in a while, you're seriously hobbling what you're able to do. The trick is knowing when it's the right thing to do. It's the closest thing we've got to dark magic. Dangerous and unpredictable, certainly, but also immensely powerful. Entire industries are built around someone one day sitting down and developing a piece of non-trivial algorithm. The big data boom of a few years ago, block chains, machine learning, ...

by tensor 4y ago

andirk 4y ago

"It reads like newspaper" a man once told me about jQuery. A great compliment to that code and something I stive for with each new line!

elcritch 4y ago

Certainly the best code is simple and easy to read, and yet still concise. But even "clever" code can be better than truly bad code. I'd wager that those of us that frequent HN probably see less of the sort of truly bad code though since it is usually the code written at lower paying jobs and fields, but which possibly makes up more LOC than all the "ok" code.

marginalia_nu 4y ago

On the flip side, there's code that will never be easy to read. Many algorithms and data structures simply don't break down to anything that is easy to comprehend. Like even something as freshman as mergesort falls in this category where you're sort of squinting and wincing trying to figure out how p, q and w relates to i, j, i0 and j0. Sure you can say let the PhD students write that code and put it in a library and we'll just worry about `sort(array, start, end)`, but that's just sweeping this reality under the rug. Truth is if you're not willing to venture into this territory of non-trivial algorithms once in a while, you're seriously hobbling what you're able to do. The trick is knowing when it's the right thing to do. It's the closest thing we've got to dark magic. Dangerous and unpredictable, certainly, but also immensely powerful. Entire industries are built around someone one day sitting down and developing a piece of non-trivial algorithm. The big data boom of a few years ago, block chains, machine learning, ...