As a software developer, the less ambiguous your notation is, the better it is for everyone involved. Not only will I use brackets, I’ll split my expression into multiple rows and use tabs to make it as readable as humanly possible. And maybe throw a comment or 2 if there’s still some black magic involved
I had someone submit a pull request recently that, in addition to their actual changes, also removed every single parenthesis that wasn’t strictly necessary in a file full of 3D math functions. I know it was probably the fault of an autoformatter they used, but I was still the most offended I’ve ever been at a pull request.
As a professor said, most programming languages don’t care about readability and whitespace. But we care because humans need it to parse meaning. Thus, write code for people, not for the machine. Always assume that someone with no knowledge of the context will have to debug it, and be kind to them. Because that someone might be you in six months when you have completely forgotten how the code works.
Yep, if you’re writing code for a machine, just do it in binary to save compilation time (/s just in case). Also, you in six months will indeed be someone with no knowledge of the context. And every piece of code you think you write for one-time use is guaranteed to be reused every day for the next 5 years
I genuinely hate being human for this stuff. So many things have such crazy computational shortcuts, it’s sometimes difficult to remember which part represents reality. Outside of the realm of math, where “imaginary” numbers are still a touch of enigma to me, so many algorithms are based on general assumptions about reality or the specific task, that the programmatic approach NEVER encapsulates the full scope of the problem.
As in, sometimes if you know EXACTLY how a tool works, you might still have no idea about the significance of that tool. Even in a universe where no one is lazy, and everyone wants to know “why?”, the answers are NOT forthcoming.
As a software developer, the less ambiguous your notation is, the better it is for everyone involved. Not only will I use brackets, I’ll split my expression into multiple rows and use tabs to make it as readable as humanly possible. And maybe throw a comment or 2 if there’s still some black magic involved
I had someone submit a pull request recently that, in addition to their actual changes, also removed every single parenthesis that wasn’t strictly necessary in a file full of 3D math functions. I know it was probably the fault of an autoformatter they used, but I was still the most offended I’ve ever been at a pull request.
Autoformatter? More like obfuscator
As a professor said, most programming languages don’t care about readability and whitespace. But we care because humans need it to parse meaning. Thus, write code for people, not for the machine. Always assume that someone with no knowledge of the context will have to debug it, and be kind to them. Because that someone might be you in six months when you have completely forgotten how the code works.
Source code is for humans, then the compiler turns it into code for machines.
Yep, if you’re writing code for a machine, just do it in binary to save compilation time (/s just in case). Also, you in six months will indeed be someone with no knowledge of the context. And every piece of code you think you write for one-time use is guaranteed to be reused every day for the next 5 years
I genuinely hate being human for this stuff. So many things have such crazy computational shortcuts, it’s sometimes difficult to remember which part represents reality. Outside of the realm of math, where “imaginary” numbers are still a touch of enigma to me, so many algorithms are based on general assumptions about reality or the specific task, that the programmatic approach NEVER encapsulates the full scope of the problem.
As in, sometimes if you know EXACTLY how a tool works, you might still have no idea about the significance of that tool. Even in a universe where no one is lazy, and everyone wants to know “why?”, the answers are NOT forthcoming.
You’re a good human being.
As someone who used to code in Lisp, I’m all for excessive paranthesis use.