jdow@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
From: "John Summerfied" <debian@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Mike McCarty wrote:
John Summerfied wrote:
Mike McCarty wrote:
I'd be ashamed if my C code were so incomprehensible and
poorly documented.
We obviously have different ideas about what good programming
really means. To almost quote Hoare: There are two ways to
write programs. One can make them so simple that there
obviously are no defects, or one can make them so complicated
that there are no obvious defects. The former is much more
difficult.
and nobody does the latter.
If you don't understand the language, you're not qualified to judge
the quality or qualities of the code.
Negative. Undocumented code is "a bad thing." Sadly, we all seem to
commit to much of it. We presume the next poor sod who gets to play
with the code will understand the subtleties of the language and see
what we're doing instantly. We discover, when we are the next poor
sod some years down the line that we've forgotten that language after
picking up 7 others.
Regular expressions are a feature that could use more documentation
than they usually get.
{o.o}
Ever since serving said sentence, I have been of the opinion that all
newly minted programmers should first serve time in the purgatory known
as "software maintenance programming." Only after getting an
appreciation for how hard it is to divine someone else's obscure code
should they be unleashed on the world and allowed to create their own
inscrutable incantations.
That being said, I probably do most of my current development in perl
which has been described as a "write only" language. I prefer to call
it the Swiss Army Knife of programming languages.
Cheers,
Dave
