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> As an industry we have no objective measures for what makes code "better", so in many ways these debates are pointless. I don't know why people keep saying t

by Retra 12y ago

> As an industry we have no objective measures for what makes code "better", so in many ways these debates are pointless. I don't know why people keep saying this. We write code to solve problems. The best code solves the most problems in the most correct and efficient ways. Regardless of your measure of efficiency, if someone cannot quickly tell if your code is correct, does what is intended, and does or does not apply to their problem, then the code isn't good. That's your measure: Can the people who want to solve the problem you are trying to solve efficiently identify, evaluate, and employ your attempted solution?

kasey_junk 12y ago
Nothing in your measure can actually be "measured". That is given 2 different solutions to the same problem, how do you determine which is better? The reason people keep saying that we don't have any measures that do this, is that it is a bafflingly tricky problem that has been studied for decades with hardly any forward progress, and lies at the heart of most of the big issues in our industry.
- Retra 12y ago
  What makes you think it can't be measured? Just because we don't have the infrastructure to do it doesn't mean it can't be done. >The reason people keep saying that we don't have any measures that do this, is that it is a bafflingly tricky problem that has been studied for decades with hardly any forward progress And what if I had a solution? How does this comment help anything? What do you think the difference is between unsolved and unsolvable, and how does your reaction not foolishly apply to both? How would you recognize progress in the context of my post? Here's a Haskell factorial function: -- Basic factorial function. fac :: Integer -> Integer fac n = product [1..n] Here's an attempt at a factorial function in another language: .r $15265f38a [] (44) ; dup n + offset; _ Which is better code? Do they both compute a factorial? Do they both terminate? How did you determine this without using any 'measurable' data?
  - kasey_junk 12y ago
    >I don't know why people keep saying this. What I'm getting at is that determining which of 2 pieces of code are better is one of the biggest open question in the computer science/software industry. Further, it has been widely studied for a long time and across a wide variety of measurements and contexts, yet remains an open question. If you have a measure that can be systematically reproduced by anyone for any 2 pieces of code that purport to solve the same problem, that would be a huge breakthrough worthy of wide publication and probable riches. If you can make that machinable (even given caveats around provably impossible things like the halting problem) you could literally transform the entire industry.
    - Retra 12y ago
      This is a very complex problem on a very volatile dataset. It would be like asking a physicist to predict the outcome of an foot race by calculating a complete quantum description of all the runners. If that is your standard, then it is highly impractical, but not theoretically meaningless. However, "determining which of 2 pieces of code are better" is not such a problem. It is one that can be solved by heuristics and approximation, just the same as predicting the outcome of a race can. So while there is as of yet no perfect algorithm, I would strongly disagree that there is _no_ algorithm or that there is no way to compare different algorithms meaningfully. We have measurements, and just because they are not perfect doesn't mean they cannot be verifiably correct within a useful margin of error. We can reliably tell which two pieces of code are better. We cannot do it with extreme precision, and we cannot do it quickly enough to make predictions, but this does not mean that the concept of 'better code' is invalid or not understood in a productive sense. It certainly doesn't mean you can't make informal arguments from it.
- deleted 12y ago
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by Retra 12y ago

kasey_junk 12y ago

Nothing in your measure can actually be "measured". That is given 2 different solutions to the same problem, how do you determine which is better? The reason people keep saying that we don't have any measures that do this, is that it is a bafflingly tricky problem that has been studied for decades with hardly any forward progress, and lies at the heart of most of the big issues in our industry.

Retra 12y ago
What makes you think it can't be measured? Just because we don't have the infrastructure to do it doesn't mean it can't be done. >The reason people keep saying that we don't have any measures that do this, is that it is a bafflingly tricky problem that has been studied for decades with hardly any forward progress And what if I had a solution? How does this comment help anything? What do you think the difference is between unsolved and unsolvable, and how does your reaction not foolishly apply to both? How would you recognize progress in the context of my post? Here's a Haskell factorial function: -- Basic factorial function. fac :: Integer -> Integer fac n = product [1..n] Here's an attempt at a factorial function in another language: .r $15265f38a [] (44) ; dup n + offset; _ Which is better code? Do they both compute a factorial? Do they both terminate? How did you determine this without using any 'measurable' data?
- kasey_junk 12y ago
  >I don't know why people keep saying this. What I'm getting at is that determining which of 2 pieces of code are better is one of the biggest open question in the computer science/software industry. Further, it has been widely studied for a long time and across a wide variety of measurements and contexts, yet remains an open question. If you have a measure that can be systematically reproduced by anyone for any 2 pieces of code that purport to solve the same problem, that would be a huge breakthrough worthy of wide publication and probable riches. If you can make that machinable (even given caveats around provably impossible things like the halting problem) you could literally transform the entire industry.
  - Retra 12y ago
    This is a very complex problem on a very volatile dataset. It would be like asking a physicist to predict the outcome of an foot race by calculating a complete quantum description of all the runners. If that is your standard, then it is highly impractical, but not theoretically meaningless. However, "determining which of 2 pieces of code are better" is not such a problem. It is one that can be solved by heuristics and approximation, just the same as predicting the outcome of a race can. So while there is as of yet no perfect algorithm, I would strongly disagree that there is _no_ algorithm or that there is no way to compare different algorithms meaningfully. We have measurements, and just because they are not perfect doesn't mean they cannot be verifiably correct within a useful margin of error. We can reliably tell which two pieces of code are better. We cannot do it with extreme precision, and we cannot do it quickly enough to make predictions, but this does not mean that the concept of 'better code' is invalid or not understood in a productive sense. It certainly doesn't mean you can't make informal arguments from it.
deleted 12y ago
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