Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
-
So I told my wife one week ago: "Yeah, you should totally learn to code as well!"
Yesterday a package arrived, containing a really beautiful hardcover book bound in leather, with a gold foil image of a snake debossed into the cover, with the text "In the face of ambiguity -- Refuse the temptation to guess" on it.
Well, OK, that's weird.
My wife snatches it and says: "I had that custom made by a book binder". I flip through it. It contains the Python 3.9 language reference, and the PEP 8 styleguide.
While I usually dislike paper dev books because they become outdated over time, I'm perplexed by this one, because of how much effort and craftsmanship went in to it. I'm even a little jealous.
So, this morning I was putting dishes into the dishwasher, and she says: "Please let me do that". I ask: "Am I doing anything wrong?"
Wife responds: "Well, it's not necessarily wrong, I mean, it works, doesn't it? But your methods aren't very pythonic. Your conventions aren't elegant at all". I don't think I've heard anyone say the word "pythonic" to me in over a decade.
And just now my wife was looking over my shoulder as I was debugging some lower level Rust code filled with network buffers and hex literals, and she says: "Pffffff unbelievable, I thought you were a senior developer. That code is really bad, there are way too many abbreviated things. Readability counts! I bet if you used Python, your code would actually work!"
I think I might have released something really evil upon the world.29 -
Sad story about refactoring.
Programmer: I cleaned up the codes, extract reusable methods, reduced repetitive code and improve overall readability and maintainability.
Manager: why the page still display the same.
Programmer: ...7 -
Manager: Why are you always refactoring?
Me: Refactoring keeps the codebase's entropy in check :)
Manager: mind blown!!
3 -
I had a coworker used to write PHP pages in this way:
<?php
echo "<html>";
echo "<head>";
// 2000+ lines of un-indented nightmares
I tried suggesting him to keep the HTML outside php tags as much as possible and I stressed out that adding some indentation to the code would have improved readability. I also sent him an example of my code created using an IDE with auto-indent functionality.
His creepy answer was: «Readability is subjective. Anyway I'll try to get used to the sinusoidal trend of your code.»11 -
New guy at work asks me for a code review. 16 lines added, and I have 4 comments, all about readability. Only the major stuff because I went easy on him. I even ignored a missing semicolon.
Guy comes to me and explains that code review is about if code works, not what it should look like. "You want me to write it your way, and we'll have endless arguments if that's how you do code reviews. But I'll do your requested changes." Reduces his entire code to two lines, which make a lot more sense.
Later, I ask him why he used "void 0" anyway. I was wondering if he's thinking of security aspects or if there's another reason. His answer: "because it looks cool and nobody else does it". -
Why is the ternary operator such a hated thing? I constantly hear people saying it's less readable, confusing, etc.
I think it's a beautiful, useful, and important operator and I use it constantly wherever readability won't be much affected.
How can you justify a repetitive if/else structure over a ternary, given that you're sure you're not going to put anything else in the ifs?
Whatever happened to DRY?
Whatever happened to KISS?
If those guidelines are what you code by, what's the excuse not to use it?
Because you can't read it as well? Familiarity breeds comprehension and legibility, my dudes.15 -
So my team lead told me in a code review that you shouldn't use 'else if' in code.
Instead you should best them like:
if
else
if
else
if
else
Apparently that would improve readability...
Am I crazy, or what?18 -
Been reviewing ALOT of client code and supplier’s lately. I just want to sit in the corner and cry.
Somewhere along the line the education system has failed a generation of software engineers.
I am an embedded c programmer, so I’m pretty low level but I have worked up and down and across the abstractions in the industry. The high level guys I think don’t make these same mistakes due to the stuff they learn in CS courses regarding OOD.. in reference how to properly architect software in a modular way.
I think it may be that too often the embedded software is written by EEs and not CEs, and due to their curriculum they lack good software architecture design.
Too often I will see huge functions with large blocks of copy pasted code with only difference being a variable name. All stuff that can be turned into tables and iterated thru so the function can be less than 20 lines long in the end which is like a 200% improvement when the function started out as 2000 lines because they decided to hard code everything and not let the code and processor do what it’s good at.
Arguments of performance are moot at this point, I’m well aware of constraints and this is not one of them that is affected.
The problem I have is the trying to take their code in and understand what’s its trying todo, and todo that you must scan up and down HUGE sections of the code, even 10k+ of line in one file because their design was not to even use multiple files!
Does their code function yes .. does it work? Yes.. the problem is readability, maintainability. Completely non existent.
I see it soo often I almost begin to second guess my self and think .. am I the crazy one here? No. And it’s not their fault, it’s the education system. They weren’t taught it so they think this is just what programmers do.. hugely mundane copy paste of words and change a little things here and there and done. NO actual software engineers architecture systems and write code in a way so they do it in the most laziest, way possible. Not how these folks do it.. it’s like all they know are if statements and switch statements and everything else is unneeded.. fuck structures and shit just hard code it all... explicitly write everything let’s not be smart about anything.
I know I’ve said it before but with covid and winning so much more buisness did to competition going under I never got around to doing my YouTube channel and web series of how I believe software should be taught across the board.. it’s more than just syntax it’s a way of thinking.. a specific way of architecting any software embedded or high level.
Anyway rant off had to get that off my chest, literally want to sit in the corner and cry this weekend at the horrible code I’m reviewing and it just constantly keeps happening. Over and over and over. The more people I bring on or acquire projects it’s like fuck me wtf is this shit!!! Take some pride in the code you write!16 -
In our morning stand up, dev was bragging about how much code he was refactoring (like over-the-top bragging) and how much the changes will improve readability (WTF does that mean?), performance, blah blah blah. Boss was very impressed, I wasn't. This morning I looked at the change history and yes, he spent nearly two solid days changing code. What code? A service that is over 10 years old, hasn't been used in over 5, mostly auto-generated code (various data contracts from third party systems). He "re-wrote" the auto-generated code, "fixed" various IDisposable implementations and other complete wastes of time. How –bleep-ing needy are people for praise and how –bleep-ing stupid are people for believing such bull-bleep? I think I should get a t-shirt made with a picture of a BS-Meter and when he starts talking, “Wait a sec, I gotta change my shirt. OK…you were saying?”
5 -
Well, if your tests fails because it expects 1557525600000 instead of 1557532800000 for a date it tells you exactly: NOTHING.
Unix timestamp have their point, yet in some cases human readability is a feature. So why the fuck don't you display them not in a human readable format?
Now if you'd see:
2019-05-10T22:00:00+00:00
vs the expected
2019-05-11T00:00:00+00:00
you'd know right away that the first date is wrong by an offset of 2 hours because somebody fucked up timezones and wasn't using a UTC calculation.
So even if want your code to rely on timestamps, at least visualize your failures in a human readable way. (In most cases I argue that keeping dates as an iso string would be JUST FUCKING FINE performance-wise.)
Why do have me parse numbers? Show me the meaningful data.
Timestamps are for computers, dates are for humans.3 -
I've been working towards a degree in CS recently after being out of school nearly 10 years. I've been trying really hard to keep an open mind and not complain about the professors, but I have to let this out.
My one class we have to write all of our code in their specified editor which I hate, but I understand the need for standardization, but then once it is error free we have to copy and paste the code into ms word and turn it in!! Really?! In 2018 I can't just submit my source files and you open them to run and grade? I seriously have to copy my code into ms word for you to grade it? I don't even understand how you would grade that because it kills the formatting and readability, not to mention the quotes get changed to their curly counterpart which isn't valid syntax.7 -
SICK AND TIRED OF READABILITY VS. EFFICIENCY!!!!!!!
I HAD TO SEPARATE A 4 LOC JSON STRING, WHICH HAD AN ARRAY OF A SINGLE KEY-VALUE PAIRS (TOTAL OF 10 OBJECTS IN THE ARRAY).
ITS READABLE IF YOU KNOW JSON. HOW HARD IS TO READ JSON FORMAT IF YOU GET YOUR STYLE AND INDENTATION PROPERLY?!?
SO I HAD TO
BREAK THE POOR FREAKING JSON APART TO A FUCKING DIFFERENT YAML FILE FORMAT ONLY SO I CAN CALL IT FROM THERE TO THE MAIN CONTROLLER, ITERATE AND MANIPULATE ALL THE ID AND VALUES FROM YAML BACK TO MATCH THE EXPECTED JSON RESPONSE IN THE FRONT END.
THE WHOLE PROCESS TOOK ME ABOUT 15 MINUTES BUT STILL, THE FUCKING PRINCIPLE DRIVES ME INSANE.
WHY THE FUCK SHOULD I WASTE TIME AT AN ALREADY WORKING PIECE OF CODE, TO MAKE IT LESS EFFICIENT AND A SLIGHTLY BIT MORE READABLE?!? FML.5 -
I need to stop sacrificing readability for smaller amounts of code. What looks good to me isn’t always best for everyone and that’s a fucking tough pill to swallow.4
-
Is it just the novice in me that finds the Haskell community's misguided obsession over character count really annoying? Learn You a Haskell For Greater Good states
> Shorter code means less bugs
A lot of people and resources seem to share this opinion, but it's obviously false. Simpler code means less bugs, but look at this function which just means "apply this applicative to each element of a list"
> sequence :: (Applicative f) => [f a] -> f [a]
> sequence = foldr (liftA2 (:)) (pure [])
This isn't "less buggy", it's fucking madness. The same in JS, the king of unreadable languages, would be:
function sequence(seq, val, apply = (f, x) => f(x)) {
seq.map(f => apply(f, val))
}
Seriously, how can you design a strictly typed language that gets beaten by JS in readability?16 -
Okay so I have been a consumer of devRant for a while now but never posted anything. This is my first.
So yesterday I modified an existing method(some very minor changes!!). Today after coming to the office I see that I have comments from Sonarqube stating
"Reduce cognitive complexity from ** to 15.
I get that it is a good measure to maintain readability but this refactoring is not part of my change at all and any mishap can break the whole code base!!!.
My code even won't build because of this company restriction that there should not be any issues from Sonarqube.
I really want to bash my head against the wall right now.11 -
So my dear programming teacher really hates break statements... I mean really really really. He thinks it's better for readability if you don't break from any kinds of loops (not even ifs) well then we came across a switch statement in class. He says "breaks only exist because it's needed in switches" well how about returning from a fcking swith? or goto? then you need no break...
Is there anyone who could explain why I should NEVER use breaks and why it's bad in any piece of code? Why is it better to just use whiles because fors are apparently evil again? Srsly I just wanna ask him to show me some big code bases without breaks...8 -
The senior dev in my team wants me to convert all the lambda expressions I have written to anonymous inner classes. He says it will increase the code readability.
IT IS NOT MY FAULT THAT YOU CAN'T READ LAMDA EXPRESSIONS!!!!
It's like the dev has something against the new features of Java87 -
Lessons I've learnt so far on programming
-- Your best written code today can be your worst tomorrow (Focus more on optimisation than style).
-- Having zero knowledge of a language then watching video tutorials is like purchasing an arsenal before knowing what a gun is (Read the docs instead).
-- It's works on my machine! Yes, because you built on Lenovo G-force but never considered the testers running on Intel Pentium 0.001 (Always consider low end devices).
-- "Programming" is you telling a story and without adding "comments" you just wrote a whole novel having no punctuation marks (Always add comments, you will thank yourself later for it I promise).
-- In programming there is nothing like "done"! You only have "in progress" or "abandoned" (Deploy progressively).
-- If at this point you still don't know how to make an asynchronous call in your favourite language, then you are still a rookie! take that from me. (Asynchronous operation is a key feature in programming that every coder should know).
-- If it's more than two conditions use "Switch... case" else stick with "If... else" (Readability should never be under-rated).
-- Code editors can MAKE YOU and BREAK YOU. They have great impact on your coding style and delivery time (Choose editors wisely).
-- Always resist the temptation of writing the whole project from scratch unless needs be (Favor patching to re-creation).
-- Helper methods reduces code redundancy by a large chunk (Always have a class in your project with helper methods).
-- There is something called git (Always make backups).
-- If you don't feel the soothing joy that comes in fixing a bug then "programming" is a no-no (Coding is fun only when it works).
-- Get angry with the bugs not the testers they're only noble messengers (Bugs are your true enemy).
-- You would learn more than a lot reading the codes of others and I mean a lot! (Code review promotes optimisation and let's you know when you are writing macaroni).
-- If you can do it without a framework you have yourself a big fat plus (Frameworks make you entirely dependent).
-- Treat your code like your pet, stop taking care of it and it dies! (Codes are fragile and needs regular updates to stay relevant).
Programming is nothing but fun and I've learnt that a long time ago.6 -
!rant, TL;DR at the bottom
Holy fuck, Yesterday, I got absolutely schooled by a literal newbie.
And I mean, NEWBIE newbie, the dude just started a Computer Science degree, and has been learning Java only for a MONTH. He has 0 prior experience with code or anything of the like, and he's somewhat of an Ars(Israel's version of a Gopnik).
So I was helping him with some stuff he didn't understand, and lo and behold his code was probably the most aesthetically pleasing and organized code I have seen in my 8 years of programming(I know 8 is not much, but It's at least above beginner level). The dude's a perfectionist, so I was like, "Okay, very impressive, but makes sense for perfectionism"(I straight up told him: "Damn, I've seen people with years of programming experience who can't learn to write this well, and you do this by default? I envy whoever's going to work with you"), and then I saw the way he writes checks(as in, methods that return a boolean) and I think I came.
The code was:
[First method in the picture]
And I know, it doesn't look as ✨ WOW✨ as I make it sound, but in my personal opinion this both looks much better and is much more readable than what I normally write:
[Second method in the picture]
and whenever there are longer or more complicated checks it makes it look like a simple puzzle that just fits in all the pieces nicely, for example in a rectangle class we had to write an 'isIn' method, this is how I wrote it:
[Third method in the picture]
His way of writing the same thing was:
[Fourth method in the picture]
Which I think is soooooo much better and readable and organized,
It's enough just looking at the short return statement to immediately understand everything that's going on.
"Oh, so it just checks if the SW(South West, i.e. Bottom Left) corner is above and to the right, and if the NE(North East, i.e. Top Right) corner is bellow and to the left"
Point of the story? Some people are just fucking awesome. And sometimes the youngest/most inexperienced people can teach you new tricks.
And to all of you dinosaurs here with like, 20+ years of experience, y'all can still learn even from us stupid ones. If 8 years can get schooled by a 1 month, 20 years can get schooled by a 1 year.
Listen to everyone everybody, never know where you might learn something new.
TL;DR: Got schooled by a local "Gopnik" who only started learning programming a month ago with 0 prior experience with his insane level of organization and readability.
30 -
As a pretty solid Angular dev getting thrown a react project over the fence by his PM I can say:
FUCK REACT!
It is nigh impossible to write well structured, readable, well modularized code with it and not twist your mind in recursion from "lift state up" and "rendercycle downwards only"
Try writing a modular modal as a modern function component with interchangeable children (passeable to the component as it should be) that uses portals and returns the result of the passed children components.
Closest I found to it is:
c o d e s a n d b o x.io/s/7w6mq72l2q
(and its a fucking nightmare logic wise and readability wise)
And also I still wouldn't know right of the bat how to get the result from the passed child components with all the oneway binding CLUSTERFUCK.
And even if you manage to there is no chance to do it async as it should be.
You HAVE to write a lot of "HTML" tags in the DOM that practically should not be anywhere but in async functions.
In Angular this is a breeze and works like a charm.
Its not even much gray matter to it...
I can´t comprehend how companies decide to write real big web apps with it.
They must be a MESS to maintain.
For a small "four components that show a counter and fetch user images" - OK.
But fo a big webapp with a big team etc. etc.?
Asking stuff about it on Stackoverflow I got edited unsolicited as fuck and downvoted as fuck in an instant.
Nobody explained anything or even cared to look at my Stackblitz.
Unsolicited edit, downvote, closevote and of they go - no help provided whatsoever.
Its completely fine if you don't have time to help strangers - but then at least do not stomp on beginners like that.
I immediately regretted asking a toxic community like this something that I genuinely seem to not understand. Wasn't SO about helping people?
I deleted my post there and won't be coming back and doing something productive there anytime soon.
Out of respect for my clients budget I'm now doing it the ugly react way and forget about my software architecture standards but as soon as I can I will advise switching to Angular.
If you made it here: WOW
Thank you for giving me a vent to let off some steam :)13 -
I'm feeling like writing this down...
So today I got told off by my boss. Why? Because my job bores me.
My current title, "webmaster", is quite similar to "plumber" where I work. I fix holes on our websites, and I tell "qualified" people (external providers) how a project should be made. Nothing exciting, nothing creative, boring.
So I got told off today for being "laid-back" in a newsletter project (GDPR, looking at you) and not being thorough in my procedures of testing and configuration. Fair enough, I didn't care and I admitted it. It's a boring drag-and-drop done in literally 5 minutes, there's no added brain-value here. Plus I got told off by my IT Manager because our Exchange server would not let me receive test emails. Still doesn't work after a day. Yay.
Then she said "we're doing exciting things here, it's not always the case anywhere else you'd work". And I'm like: "really? I love writing code, seeing things coming alive, investigating why things don't run smoothly, writing efficient code (both in performance and in readability)". I hear many friend devs telling me they're doing that and what they do during their "dev-day"... All I'm doing here is "maintenance" (a.k.a boring) stuff that apparently is "exciting". Adding a <script> to handle google tag manager is hell fun, going through compiled CSS and change color values is also thrilling, finding out if a PDF handler application can handle PDF files, re-plugging a computer monitor to make it work...
I think she meant that I'm not at my place here.
Didn't want to tell her that I have no motivation in doing things I don't enjoy making, i.e, my job.
Good thing I have an interview in two weeks2 -
to the guys saying "oop is dumb" / "i don't need oop" / "i've never worked with oop"...
i have some questions:
- which language are you working with
- which problems are you solving
- how big is your code base
- how do you maintain readability of your code?
don't get me wrong, i don't believe that oop is always the answer. i'm just curious which fields these statements are coming from. if they all come from a low level (assembler, C, ..) or functional languages or "scripty" languages (python, JS), or if there are also people working with languages like C++ where oop is pretty much established. and if the latter, i'm curious how people design their code and what problems they solve... tell me your story :D30 -
While parsing nodes in a graph.
In terms of readability and variable naming, how wrong (if at all) is to use:
1. broNode (for sibling nodes)
2. papaNode / mamaNode (for parent nodes)
3. babyNode (for child nodes)
I sincerely don't know how to review this PR7 -
In C# using "this."
WHY? It doesn't help with readability. It just clutters up the code and adds nothing.
It should never be a required prefix.
What makes it worse is, Visual Studio greys it out because its not required!
Then there is stylecop. This got enabled on our project which generated 3000 build errors because of missing "this."9 -
sensible naming stuff for readability? nah.. it's not like someone will read my code after i'm done here right?
1 -
Rant!
Why enforce a 90 character limit in code file (C++)
It does not make readability any better..
you either break up functions that barely exceed the limits
or
start making nonsense variable names just because they are short.20 -
+1 if you are interested in Augmented Reality technologies, have some presentations and assignments made and you are writing your Master thesis for Augmented Reality only to find yourself working for a company that wants from you to update somehow a project with 5 years old code written from some secret antisocial society that hates readability and you as a developer and a human being and wants from you to somehow understand why they call C# method only to return a string that contains all the html tags but no data and then insert the data in JavaScript splitting the same string.
Come on, give me a break! I m still trying, though I still haven't found where exactly the program learns the data to insert or it just knows (no questions asked)...6 -
Any code should be simple and easy to read / understand.
I just reworked an old stored SQL proc.
Went from 102 lines to ... 10.
More I code, more I realize that maintainability, readability, comments and unit tests are more important than actual code. (And performances ofc. But if 1 line code does it in 1 second and 500 lines code in 0.2 seconds, I’ll take one line solution every time)5 -
Follow-up on https://devrant.com/rants/5001553/...
How the fuck are Jupyter notebooks so popular in research? Like some dude had an idea to take perfectly good markdown and python code, add a whole lot of transitional properties to make version control impossible, encode it as JSON on the assumption that a human could somehow look at it and make sense of countless escaped characters and base64 encoded data, create dedicated software people need to install in order to read what used to be simple plain text, and think "This. This is what 99% of data researchers will use from now on." And somehow, overwhelming majority of researchers agreed that this extremely inefficient data format is the best there is and they should develop all their tools around it.11 -
Got asked by a coworker for some help, looked at the code and told him it could be written better and show him the example.
His reply : "It's not easy to read for me"
That was ok but then, now here's the kicker, he asked another coworker to come and see which was easier to read.
You did what mate?
So of course i got pissed and went out for a smoke just to return to see my version being used.
WHY THE FUCK DID YOU ARGUE ABOUT READABILITY IF YOU"RE GOING TO USE IT ANYWAY???
Fuken fuk, never again am i going to offer optimization support to people. -
I'm shitting there hammering out some code butchering some real problems when I suddenly realise I'm surrounded. I look around and yes it's the bloody committee.
The committee is what I call the rest of the department and it is dominated by the old guard which comprises of the programmers that have been around for longer.
None of the old guard can program particularly well but because they had been around the longest they'd all grown senior. The committee had free reign but anyone else doing anything differently has to get approval from the committee.
The only way to code otherwise was to copy and paste existing code then to primarily rename things. If anyone did anything that hadn't been seen before then it would have to be approved by the committee. Individual action was not permitted unless you were old guard.
I swept my headphones away expecting it to be something unimportant. It was.
First things first they announce. We're going to add extraneous commas to the last element of all possible lists separated by comma including parameters or so they say. Ask but why so I do.
Because the language now supports it. They added support for it so it must be the right way someone proclaimed. Does it? I didn't realise we were waiting for it. Why do we want it though?
Didn't you hear? It's all over the blogosphere. It massively improves merge requests. But how I ask?
Five minutes later I grow tired of the chin stroking, elbow harnessing, slanted gazes into the yonder and occasionally hearing maybe its because and ask if they mean when you for example add an element the last element registers as changed from adding a comma. Turns out that's all it is.
How often do we see that tiny distraction and isn't it pointless to make the code ugly just for a tiny transient reduction in diff noise I ask. Everyone's stumped. This went on and on and got worse and worse. But it makes moving things around easy half of them say in unison like the bunch of slobs that they are. I mean really. It doesn't make expanding and contracting statements from multiline to single line easy and it's such a stupid thing. Is that all they do all day? Move multi-line method parameters up and down all day? If their coding conventions weren't totally whack they wouldn't have so many multiline method prototypes with stupid amounts of parameters with stupidly long types and names. They all use the same smart IDE which can also surely handle fixing the last comma and why is that even a concern given all the other outrageously verbose and excessive conventions for readability?
But you know what, who cares, fine, whatever. Lets put commas all over the shop and then we can all go to the pub and woo the ladies with how cool and trendy we are up to date with all the latest trends and fashions then we go home with ten babes hanging off each arm and get so laid we have to take a sick day the following to go to the STD clinic. Make way for we are conformists.
But then someone had to do it. They had to bring up PSR. Yes, another braindead committee that produces stupid decisions. Should brackets be same line or next line, I know, lets do both they decided. Now we have to do PSR and aren't allowed to use sensible conventions.
But why, I ask after explaining it's actually quite useful as a set of documents we can plagiarise as a starting point but then modify but no, we have to do exactly what PSR says. We're all too stupid apparently you see. Apparently we're not on their level. We're mere mortals. The reason or so I'm told, is so that anyone can come in and is they know PSR coding styles be able to read and write the code. That's not how it works. If you can't adjust to a different style, a more consistent style, that's not massively bizarre or atypical but rather with only minor differences from standard styles, you're useless. That's not even an argument, it's a confession that you've got a lump of coal where your brain's supposed to be.
Through all of this I don't really care because I long ago just made my own code generators or transpilers that work two ways and switch things between my shit and their shit but share my wisdom anyway because I'm a greedy scumbag like that.
Where the shit really hit the fan is that I pointed out that PSR style guide doesn't answer all questions nor covers all cases so what do we do then. If it's not in PSR? Then we're fucked.4 -
i'm making my python prof wanna strangle me again, it's 100% the same as the example output, for those wondering why i do this to him it's because he said he "favors speed over readability" so i'm doing as he asks
code:
print("\nThe cost of the item is "+str((float(input("Enter the retail value: "))/(1+float(input("enter the markup percentage (e.g. 0.9): ")))))+"\n\nEnd of Report")18 -
the Death Valley of PR approval
I have almost 3 years of work experience in programming professionally. Currently this is my second company. Previous company I worked for was very loose regarding clean code, code readability, tests etc. It was their way of doing things fast, making working changes quickly was the most important thing due to its business. Now I work in company where I spend a lot of time in some limbo when my code works and my code is merged. It sucks, I make all kinds of mistakes which would be tolerable in my previous workplace, but now it keeps me from releasing code. I now the way I do things now is the right way and it will result in me growing as a specialist, but it is very frustrating and damages my self esteem. I hope it will pass one day.7 -
Someone just explain me why. I really can't figure other reason that beeing too lazy to think a condition while writing a "while loop".
At university, a colleague asked me what i think of his code. I see something like that:
while ( 1 ){
...
if (condition)
break;
...
}
Am I a fucking genius thinking that just moving condition into while will improve readability, or am i a fucking stupid ? Really not the first time seeing this, maybe i am missing something.4 -
Have to change out the audio player on a WordPress site for a podcast. Can't follow the code properly because wp forgets that standards are a thing. Code readability is shit as well. Fucking WordPress.6
-
Me on code review : You should extract the logic into a separate method for better readability. Colleague completely ignores it. What should I do?6
-
So I made a pull request on a PHP public repo fixing line lengths and adding some spacing for readability. All in the hopes of improving it to follow PSR-2 standards which they specifically say they follow.
Pull request got rejected, reason: "No thanks, the code is good enough."
Lol! 😐Time to move on to others who appreciate help. -
"My code is explain itself. Well, I need no comments to understand it."
I don't care if you wan't to write comments or not; If don't write any then i don't care because fuck you and your code.
May it be java, kotlin, python, javascript or anyother language, you think "everyone can read", i hope you'll never find anyone who has to deal with you and your cancerous code.7 -
!rant but a question...
I know that with the vast examples/tutorials online this may not be necessary, but I wanted to ask the community if you guys/gals would recommend going back to school to get a formal CS education or if it would be a waste of time, money, and resources compared to just using web based sources? I've tried the college thing 3 times when I was younger but couldn't concentrate and lacked the discipline to focus and finish classes. But I'm a bit older now and wanted to know if you would recommend going back to school or if time would be better spent performing self-study and learning from home?
I'm still extremely new to coding and programming and only have basic knowledge of actual coding and a lot of the theoretical stuff in programming is completely foreign to me. Like for example, how to optimize code. I know that refactoring code to have a smaller more efficient footprint is always desirable, when it doesn't interfere with readability, but I'm unaware of where/how to modify code to run efficiently. Of course that may be wayyy to advanced for my use cases anyway 😂.
I'm trying to teach myself python as it seems like a great language for starting out and getting to understand the concepts of programing. Plus, it can be used directly in my line of work as well as side projects that I wanted to try my hand at.
Thank you in advance for your recommendations everyone!2 -
Management suddenly decides they wanted to see if a new process is any good and decides to load all the work on 2 people ( including me ) and keeps the deadline 5 days later ( when one person is taking a 3 day leave in this 5 days ).
In this situation, the other person involved in the process, routinely infuriates me by suggesting we fix up something within these days and not worry about readability or code quality. My argument is the POC is subject to heavy changes, so why not make it more "modifiable" from the start and not create a sphagetti which i would be left trying to fix when he goes on leave.
I would be blamed for slowing down things unnecessarily if i put forward my argument too sternly. Genuinely conflicted about whether to go on the offensive or to accept the reality and make myself uncomfortable by doing this faster.2 -
Sydochen has posted a rant where he is nt really sure why people hate Java, and I decided to publicly post my explanation of this phenomenon, please, from my point of view.
So there is this quite large domain, on which one or two academical studies are built, such as business informatics and applied system engineering which I find extremely interesting and fun, that is called, ironically, SAD. And then there are videos on youtube, by programmers who just can't settle the fuck down. Those videos I am talking about are rants about OOP in general, which, as we all know, is a huge part of studies in the aforementioned domain. What these people are even talking about?
Absolutely obvious, there is no sense in making a software in a linear pattern. Since Bikelsoft has conveniently patched consumers up with GUI based software, the core concept of which is EDP (event driven programming or alternatively, at least OS events queue-ing), the completely functional, linear approach in such environment does not make much sense in terms of the maintainability of the software. Uhm, raise your hand if you ever tried to linearly build a complex GUI system in a single function call on GTK, which does allow you to disregard any responsibility separation pattern of SAD, such as long loved MVC...
Additionally, OOP is mandatory in business because it does allow us to mount abstraction levels and encapsulate actual dataflow behind them, which, of course, lowers the costs of the development.
What happy programmers are talking about usually is the complexity of the task of doing the OOP right in the sense of an overflow of straight composition classes (that do nothing but forward data from lower to upper abstraction levels and vice versa) and the situation of responsibility chain break (this is when a class from lower level directly!! notifies a class of a higher level about something ignoring the fact that there is a chain of other classes between them). And that's it. These guys also do vouch for functional programming, and it's a completely different argument, and there is no reason not to do it in algorithmical, implementational part of the project, of course, but yeah...
So where does Java kick in you think?
Well, guess what language popularized programming in general and OOP in particular. Java is doing a lot of things in a modern way. Of course, if it's 1995 outside *lenny face*. Yeah, fuck AOT, fuck memory management responsibility, all to the maximum towards solving the real applicative tasks.
Have you ever tried to learn to apply Text Watchers in Android with Java? Then you know about inline overloading and inline abstract class implementation. This is not right. This reduces readability and reusability.
Have you ever used Volley on Android? Newbies to Android programming surely should have. Quite verbose boilerplate in google docs, huh?
Have you seen intents? The Android API is, little said, messy with all the support libs and Context class ancestors. Remember how many times the language has helped you to properly orient in all of this hierarchy, when overloading method declaration requires you to use 2 lines instead of 1. Too verbose, too hesitant, distracting - that's what the lang and the api is. Fucking toString() is hilarious. Reference comparison is unintuitive. Obviously poor practices are not banned. Ancient tools. Import hell. Slow evolution.
C# has ripped Java off like an utter cunt, yet it's a piece of cake to maintain a solid patternization and structure, and keep your code clean and readable. Yet, Cs6 already was okay featuring optionally nullable fields and safe optional dereferencing, while we get finally get lambda expressions in J8, in 20-fucking-14.
Java did good back then, but when we joke about dumb indian developers, they are coding it in Java. So yeah.
To sum up, it's easy to make code unreadable with Java, and Java is a tool with which developers usually disregard the patterns of SAD. -
Is it just me or anybody else doesn't like the React render method. I really think it messes up the code readability.2
-
It is better to write almost all of the logic used in the code as comments/documentation.
Trust me.
It is a good thing. It increases Code readability.
Nobody is going to copy your logic and get hired in a high paying job or get promoted for that reason. People will come to know about your wit and will appreciate you instead.2 -
K&R style Brackets are so goddamn shitty. I hate hate hate hate that style. It makes code so goddamn hard to read. And for what gain? You write "less" lines of code? So what? Who gives five fucks about that? Readability is key for coders.7
-
PM: there’s a bug could you investigate and fix this?
Coworker: *investigates*
CW: is this correct? *shows a totally different solution to what he was asked to* *naming a variable “fn”*
Me: but that’s not what you’re asked to do. You know it’s possible to do that right (the supposedly solution)
Cw: but that would have longer code
Me: (what?) 🙃
Wtf do you mean longer code?
Cw: shorter code > spec
Me: 🤦♀️
Cw: shorter code > readability
Me: 🤦♀️1 -
If only more devs would use short, yet concise, modern constructs instead of archaic ones.
For example in C#: using lambdas, extension methods, LinQ,.. much easier to read through if you know how these work, rather than having to spend all day scanning tedious for-loops and over-engineered classes your colleagues wrote who don't know any better.
Examples:
vs.foreach(v => console.write(v));
initialList = secondList.Where(p => initialList.Contains(p, valueComparer))
.Concat(initialList.Where(p => !secondList.Contains(p, valueComparer))).ToList(); -
https://github.com/chrislgarry/...
The original code Apollo 11 used in 1965...
Interesting to see that they used comments for more than just readability, much like we do today!1 -
"if compiler can infer this, there is no need to add "x ->" , simply use it" ..AAAGHH FUCK YOUUUUU KOTLIN!! what else should i fucking not write? why do't you take a number of my employee and ask his requirements, maybe add a ShoppingKartApp.kt in your compiler next time? it will be completely inferred when i write "Fuck you" in the gradle.
And fucking companies are promoting this! I wonder how those devs are living there
Person A knows only that lambda is
{name:Type,name:Type->code}, and thus writes a clean code.
Person B comes says "This shit suck", writes "{ acc, i -> acc + " " + i }" ,goes away
Person A : "wtf is this shit? why it works?"
Please for the love of god, follow some rules! My first language was python, i love its zen:
- Beautiful is better than ugly.
- Simple is better than complex.
- Readability counts.
- Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
- There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
- If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
-...
I just wish it follows at least one thing from python's zen : "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it."3 -
tell me guys what would you prefer:
function a(){
..
b(..)
..
b(..)
..
}
function b(p1,p2,p3,p4,p5,p6){.
...
}
or
function a(){
..
b(..)
..
b(..)
..
}
function b(
p1,
p2,
p3,
p4,
p5,
p6
){
...
}
if you read this rant before expanding, you got a complete context on how what function a is, its calling b 2 times and how function b looks.
if instead of the first option, i had used 2nd block, you wouldn't even know the 2nd param of b function without expanding this rant.
my point?
i prefer to keeping unnecessary info on one line. and w lot of linters disagree by splitting up the code. and most importantly , my arrogant tl disagree by saying he prefers the splitted code "for readability" and becaue "he likes code this way, old-eng1 likes this and old-eng2 likes this" .
why tf does an ide have horizontal a scrolling option available when you are too stupid to use it?
ok, i know some smartass is going to point that i too can use vertical scrolling, but hear me out: i am optimising this!
case 1 : a function with 7 params is NOT split into 7 lines. lets calculate the effort to remember it
- since all params could have similar charactersticks ( they will be of some type, might have defaults, might be a suspendable/async function etc), each param will take similar memory-efforts points. say 5sp each.
- total memory-efforts= 5sp *7 = 35 sp.
- say a human has 100 sp of fast memory storage, he can use the remaining 65 sp for loading say 5 small lines above or below.
- but since 5 lines above are already read and still visible on screen, they won't be needed to be loaded again nd again, nd we can just check the lines below.
- thus we are able to store 65+35+65 = 165 sp or about 11 lines of code in out fast memory for just a 100sp brain storage
case 2 function with 7 params IS split into 7 lines.
- in this case all lines are somewhat similar. 5sp for param lines as they are still similar which implies same 35sp for storing current function and params
- remaining 65sp can only be used to store next 5 lines of 13sp as the previous code is no longer visible.
- plus if you wanna refresh the code above, you gotta scroll, which will result in removing bottom code from screen , and now your 65sp from bottom code is overwritten by 65sp of top code.
- thus at a time, you are storing only 6 lines worth of code info. this makes you slow.
this is some imaginary math, but i believe it works11 -
Learning ES6 arrow functions from Kyle Simpson's workshop video. Amazing how something that was designed to be a syntactic sugar turned out to be a code readability nightmare :(1
-
I'm working in a project that seems to be like a Multiplayer Tetris of Little Poo:
- figure out what the heck you have to code, because there is no debugging, the deploy to your devenv takes ages, the documentation does not exist or is unreadable, plus you are new and you are in a different timezone
- once you have your code, slowly pass the reviews of your remote team that will complain for every little extra line you've added for readability, slowly converting your code into a poo-like form, until it is completely shaped as shit
- repeat steps 1-2 until you pass the linter
- the carefully place your shit-shaped-code in the right place of the pile of shit
- wait for someone else to complain (like 'please rebase' 'new lint rule please fix' - oh, did I mention that? lint rules do not match between local, review and deploy?
- repeat from step 1 until you quit your job (which will happen in a few weeks) -
what's the best practice to divide long task into functions? suppose I have function of 200+ lines then from the code readability point doing short functions would be better?3
-
OpenSource is fun they said. I being a bored teen thought, ah, another chance to experiment. Discover something new. Now I am into piracy, movies, music, software. If I can get it for free I ain't paying for it. So I went on to GitHub to see what exciting new Repos I could contribute to. I hate already implemented plenty of algorithms in GO for GitHub.com/TheAlgorithms so I was looking something more practical, more beneficial to society. Then I saw it, the perfect repo, not too complex and not amateur. SpotDL/spotify-downloader for downloading songs from Spotify, a grey area coz it's technically piracy. Well not from Spotify, we fetch the info from the Spotify API and search for the songs on YouTubeMusic. They were just about to release v3, a complete rewrite of the codebase stressing code readability and stuff. I spend about a day studying the codebase, trying to findout just where I could make my contribution. I can see outright that there's a huge problem with implementation.
First of all the script spawns 4 processes for downloading songs though you might be downloading only one song. Which means for everytime you run the script you have to wait for 4 other processes to be spawned before any downloading can happen. Sure this is faster when you are downloading more than like 4 songs, but it's actually slower when downloading a single song. But I ignored that coz I assumed that most users download playlists and albums. Anyway we talked with the like lead developer and he was all like, make those PRs anytime you feel like. So I made a really minor first contribution.
I introduced download from Spotify URI functionality, modified like 10 lines of code. I was half expecting that the PR would be merged within hours at most 24 hours coz of how minor of a contribution it was, 5 days in it was pending. So I tagged the lead Dev and he was all appreciative of the PR, calling it real 'clean code' and stuff. 3 more days, the PR is still not merged. I have now stacked 4 more commits to the same PR, I tag the dev and he's like he's waiting to see if my 'feature' will get atleast 10 upvotes so that it can be merged, he links an issue. I go to the issue and my feature is not there, So 11 days after I made my PR I have to write a comment explaining the 'feature' introduced in my PR and then wait for 10 upvotes.
I was like f**k this, I'll just develop on my fork if you want the features on my fork, you will make your own PR! I am so done with OpenSource, development is slow. I have no idea how you guys do it. I can't handle development where I don't have write access.7 -
i thought whiteboarding turning into leetcode mediums or harder correctly in 20 minutes or less was bad
now codesignal is fucking us over, tried my first one without researching any of the code score shit
anybody have tips for gaming the system there? i heard claims that speed trumps correctness for their point system (e.g. faster but not passing for all test cases may score higher than slower but all test cases pass) additionally code cleanliness/readability isn't weighed as heavily as the other factors
and to do problems individually to completion further rather than spreading yourself out across multiple problems in an exam
wont deny im still a salty scrub at the end of the day -
Is this a justified code review comment or a bully?
Code reviews are weakness of this industry which has the potential to attract bullies. Abuse of the comment box in a pull request and bombarding the employee with hundreds of comments can cause stress, frustration, burnout and finally resignation and costs of fulfillment for the organization. While companies should find and stop bullying in the work place, what kind of code review comment is considered a bully and why? Any of below traits can mean you are dealing with a bully:
1. Claims the code needs to be changed but doesn't say how. So no matter how many times you change your code, he can repeat the same comment: "Your code is still bad due to blah blah and it needs to be changed".
2. Provides how the code should be changed, but the change doesn't add up to quality, security, performance, readability, etc. i.e. "Why did you use a for loop here? Use a while loop instead". Or "Why did you write it using three classes A, B and C? Instead write it using 4 classes D, E, F and G which does blah blah". In the later case, not following the review comment, you won't get approval. Following the comment means you need to rewrite your whole code. After which, you might again receive more comments to change other parts of your code!
3. Claims the requested change is due to standards but claimed standard does exist anywhere. Internet, company wiki, university course books, anywhere. In more severe cases of psychopathy, the bullying person refers you to a link which hours later turned out to be written by himself! Have fun describing what has happened to your manager or team leader... .
4. Asks the code to be changed in a way that supposedly is closer to standard or of better quality, security, performance, etc. But the proposed way will not work and is the main reason you didn't do that in the first place. So you start arguing forever in the comment box over why his method won't work!
If you cannot see any of the above traits, then keep calm, take a breath, fix your code. Otherwise you might be victim of a bully.2 -
My coding style is mostly influenced by good old personal preference, but also because of a certain internship where there was a lot of gain to be had by making everything as reusable and testable as possible.
I guess you could say my motto is usability, readability and flexibility:
I like tidy, reusable code with an emphasis on keeping code readable. I've always liked modular things I guess...
And I despise two things: curly brackets on the next line and spaces for indentation... But way worse is having no brackets at all (looking at you Python): it's clearer to have lower-level code inside some sort of "container" markers i.e. brackets (also gives more IDE functionality like color-coding hierarchically).
Indentation should always be tabs so anyone can have their own width of indentation set through their IDE, making it way more accessible to fellow colleagues!
And I also like having parameterized code over hard-coded functions: way more flexible.
Top Tags
Weekly Rant
View