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I don’t mean this to throw shade, but isn’t the whole point of writing code that someone else can understand it? I worked with some crazy smart people when I wa
by op00to 1y ago
I don’t mean this to throw shade, but isn’t the whole point of writing code that someone else can understand it? I worked with some crazy smart people when I was in academia, and when one of them left it was not worth trying to maintain what they left behind because it was so often inscrutable.
- sowbug 1y agoEven well-written code can be hard to understand -- practically impossible, even -- if what it's doing is sufficiently complex. Cryptography and certain areas of graphics have humbled me, for instance. I followed the flow, and I appreciated the comments, but I did not understand.
- handfuloflight 1y agoAny specific lines you can point to as examples in an open source repo?
- com2kid 1y agoFont rendering code is a nightmare because the problem is really damn hard. Font files are complex, and actual real world usage is even worse. Any code that involves parsing old school binary file formats is going to look ugly to modern day developers who are used to JSON everything, even if the code is actually very well structured.
- switz 1y agoThe reason to write code is to solve a problem. If the problem domain is complex, then the code to solve said problem will be inherently complex. He solved a problem.