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Good grief, what a vast amount of supposition backed up by very little evidence or insight. "People often write bad code." Yes, we know that. "There's more than
by kolektiv 14y ago
Good grief, what a vast amount of supposition backed up by very little evidence or insight. "People often write bad code." Yes, we know that. "There's more than one reason for this." Yes, we know that too.
The rest of the article is just random presumptions thrown together, for what reason I couldn't say. The best developers work in finance because the money's highest? Yeah, OK then... (To be fair, I think there is a qualifying "considered to be" in there somewhere) K is impenetrable? Hmmm. Haskell is an offshoot of ML and unreadable? Umm, factually wrong.
There's lots wrong with software at scale, and the pressures of financial institutions along with high budgets etc do produce an interesting set of problems, but this article offers nothing new about anything at all in the field.
As an aside, I already don't trust an author when they start off with a claim that textbook code is good code! It's almost universally accepted to be trivialised and simplified to the point of "don't do this in the real world" simply because it has to be. Some of the worst code I've seen has been in textbooks (and that's worst as in "dangerous" rather than as in "badly written and in need of refactoring/replacement/enclosing in concrete).
Edit to note: I think it's actually beyond incompetent journalism and in to plain lying to present a piece of code as evidence of Haskell unreadability when the link to that code on SO refers to it clearly as "obfuscated Haskell code".
- pretoriusB 14y ago>Good grief, what a vast amount of supposition backed up by very little evidence or insight. "People often write bad code." Yes, we know that. "There's more than one reason for this." Yes, we know that too. YOU AND ME know that. The title of the article is "What Compsci textbooks don't tell you", so I guess it is targeted at people still in college, to show them how things are in the "real world".
- jurre 14y agoTrust me, the example code that I get from my university is proof enough. And it makes me sad, because it makes my peers believe it's acceptable to write such poor code.
- tluyben2 14y agoYes, that makes me sad as well. I would not get a passing grade for that 20 years ago, now it's a B 'because it works'. This is too common and it's not acceptable.
- kolektiv 14y agoI know what you mean, and if I thought this article was actually targeted at students, and with any intention of enlightenment, I would agree with you. I just don't feel it deserves that credit. It's wandering, poorly researched hearsay. I would call it a hatchet job if I could tell by reading it what the target is, but it isn't even good enough for that.
- cms07 14y agoIf they are in college and don't have enough interest to already know that, then they are the problem..