The Biology of Sloppy Code
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Interesting take on different coding styles and a comparison to various scientific disciplines. Also, a little "Kumbaya" subtext to give you a warm fuzzy.
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.... Huh. I'd never thought of it like that. It will require further introspection and meditation, but my initial gut feeling is "shit, he's right"
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@Weng said:
.... Huh. I'd never thought of it like that. It will require further introspection and meditation, but my initial gut feeling is "shit, he's right"
He almost lost me at first with all those opinionated bullet points. I immediately closed my mind because I felt like he was remrpimanding the collective coding community. Then I wanted to see what other nonsenese he was going to write. The tactic worked, because I read on and realized he actually had something interesting to say.
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...that so much of my time programming these days is just [b]jamming[/b] chunks of code together...
I know someone who feels his pain.
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@frits said:
He almost lost me at first with all those opinionated bullet points. I immediately closed my mind because I felt like he was remrpimanding the collective coding community. Then I wanted to see what other nonsenese he was going to write. The tactic worked, because I read on and realized he actually had something interesting to say.
He phrased it in a unique way, but I don't think he's saying anything different than people have for the last decade. Remember IBM's big hype-fest over "self-healing software?"
Besides, his definition of "sloppy code" includes a bunch of things .net does automatically for you-- I'm thinking if the framework does it, it's by definition not sloppy. (Now if you ignored .net's serializer and wrote your own for everything... then yes, very sloppy.)
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@blakeyrat said:
Besides, his definition of "sloppy code" includes a bunch of things .net does automatically for you-- I'm thinking if the framework does it, it's by definition not sloppy.
My reading of his definition of "sloppy code" wasn't a Bad Thing, just these pracitises were sloppy a decade or more ago, but is now the future of programming. It includes things that a bunch of languages do, not just the framework, like dynamic typing. ActionScript (3) automatically and transparently changes between int, uint and Number, for example, as some functions expect one over another, even if you define your variable as one of those types.
Some people consider anything GUI to be sloppy. Why use graphical fonts when you can use 4KB of memory on the 80x25 text display and built in fonts. Why use 4KB when you should just use 2KB and not have colours? Colours are sloppy! 2KB of display frame buffer ought to be enough for everybody!
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Color? Feh! Crayolaware, I calls it!
