Comment by qayxc
4 days ago
Whitney has valid reasons to write code this way. If you look at his career, you'll understand how this is not a problem - he literally spent decades working on "one-page" programs written that way. It's not "for the lols", it's simply what he's been comfortable with for 50+ years.
He's a software developer from a different era, when individual programmers wrote tiny (by today's standard) programs that powered entire industries. So for what he's been doing his entire career, neither lack of accountability, job security, or working with teams are really applicable.
> He's a software developer from a different era
Ivory tower politics is never an excuse, and failure to adapt to the shop standards usually means your position ends. Inflicting a goofy meta-circular interpreter on people is a liability.
Anyone competent would normally revert that nonsense in about 30 seconds, as it looks like a compressed/generated underhanded payload. "Trust me bro" is also not a valid excuse. =3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conways_Law
This isn't about Ivory tower politics or gate keeping. It's just a fact. Software development changed and Whitney started his career 45 years ago.
If you need help understanding what I mean, look at the credits of computer games released in the 80s and early 90s. You'll usually find a single programmer, with maybe one or two others, who contributed specialised parts like sound/music processing or special effects. No one cared about your particular programming style, because there were no big teams, no code reviews, no PRs. If you had questions, your fellow programmer would simply sit down with you and go over the details until you got familiar with their style and -code.
> failure to adapt to the shop standards usually means your position ends
Well, he runs his own company and has been his own boss for the past 32 years so again - this simply doesn't apply to him.
It does if any of his customers ever care about maintaining the kind of code after his death.
Code is read more than it is written, and most of us don’t and wouldn’t write in this style. This could mean he’s much smarter than the rest of us, or he could just be a jerk doing his own thing. In either case I’ve never had a good experience working with coders who are this “clever”. Real brilliance is writing code anyone can understand that remains performant and well tested. This is more like the obfuscated Perl contest entries. I guess it’s cool that you can do it, but good sense dictates that you shouldn’t.
As to OPs endeavor to understand this style, it is an interesting learning approach, but I think reading a lot of code in many styles that are actually used by more than one guy is likely to get make you “smarter”.
5 replies →
Conways Law tends to manifest in both directions...
It may be profitable having systems only a few people in the world could understand, but the scope of development is constrained.
I respect your opinion, but also recognize languages like Forth/Fortran actually killed people with 1 character syntax errors. People need to be as unsurprising as possible on large team projects. Sure, all our arrays today could be written in only l's , I's, and 1's like lIl1Il1lI[I1lI11l]... and being a CEO is also still not a valid excuse. =3