Comment by raverbashing
9 months ago
> Who else has had to deal with idiots who froth at the mouth when you exceed an 80 line character margin?
Honestly, no better indication of a very mediocre developer
9 months ago
> Who else has had to deal with idiots who froth at the mouth when you exceed an 80 line character margin?
Honestly, no better indication of a very mediocre developer
My experience is that being fastidious about code formatting is independent of one's ability as a developer. i.e. not a good indicator either way.
I’ve noticed the worse someone is in a language, the worse they format it.
People then develop fastidious code formatting rules because they realize well formatted code is easier to read and extend.
Then people realize it’s the organization of the code, not the rules themselves. They have preferences, but don’t treat those preferences as “the one true way”.
So people with fastidious rules are in that middle ground of becoming less bad, and that’s a wide swath of abilities.
> Then people realize it’s the organization of the code, not the rules themselves. They have preferences, but don’t treat those preferences as “the one true way”.
Yup, I agree with this
It's not about, let's say, where your curly braces stay, but being consistent
Though in some cases I'd argue that things like a very strict 80 character limit actually results in worse code (or at least worse to read code)
Disagree. Highly disagree.
Smarter people write shittier code.
Clean code is for stupider people.
Think about it. It’s because smart people don’t need clean code. It’s so trivial to them and so readable that they really don’t need things to be ultra clean and well formatted.
So the tendency to have this ocd need to write clean code among smart people is random. They either have it or they don’t give a shit.
But among stupid people it’s not random. They need clean code because they are not smart enough to understand code that isn’t clean.
26 replies →
The best developer that I ever worked with, is "on the spectrum."
His code was really anal.
I have come to learn that there are no "rules," only heuristics.
I've inherited many sloppily formatted code bases that all contained mistakes which blended into the mess. Consistently styled code has the nice property that certain types of mistakes stand out immediately.
For example, there's a large chunk of code following an if statement, but it's indented the same as the body of the if. The dev overlooks the closing brace and puts the logic in the wrong place. Additionally, there is a nested if statement whose body is indented less than the surrounding code. It's hard to read, and error prone.
I can't imagine a "good" developer putting up with that, although I admit you don't have to be "fastidious" to prevent this type of thing.
I can't remember the last time I worked on a team without automatic linting enforced on check-in. Why would people choose to waste time arguing over that can be automated?