171–180 of 278 posts
Django! And django rest framework. To me, both codebases are so readable and so well put together that even if their documentation was bad (which it isn't), you could fully grasp their APIs and how to use their libraries by just reading through some of the code.
This python code is responsible for the fairly recent imaging of the black-hole (i.e. imaging, analysis, and simulation software for radio interferometry).
It's extremely easy to digest despite the complexity involved.
Perhaps I'm jaded, but I notice that all the examples given here are developer tools or otherwise things with well scoped functional inputs and outputs (e.g. ffmpeg). Anyone have an example of a consumer application that has a good codebase? Chromium, GitLab, OpenOffice, etc? I feel like such applications inherently have more spaghetti because the human problems they're aiming to solve are less concretly scoped. Even…
Peter Norvig's sudoku solver (Python) is excellent. Solves every possible variant of sudoku. https://norvig.com/sudoku.html
it seems that in real life, a really high-quality codebase is hard to come by I think a common misconception amongst mid-experienced programmers is that they confuse look with quality. Reading clean written code gives you a feeling of control and also the feeling that someone must have thought about that program. It's reassuring. You have in front of you a code that gives you trust. When in fact, that code can be com…
This is probably related to a factor named 'local reasoning', procedural programing tried to encourage this through procedure, OO tried to encourage this through encapsulation, and FP encourage this through purity.
Basically the goal is when anyone look into a function, the reader can easily make sense of the code without moving around.
For pure functional programming, to make sense of a function is to make sense of the branch under the acyclic calling tree of the function. The caller and sibling branches are always completely irrelevant.
So that it will be much easier to run in people's head.
Perhaps I'm jaded, but I notice that all the examples given here are developer tools or otherwise things with well scoped functional inputs and outputs (e.g. ffmpeg). Anyone have an example of a consumer application that has a good codebase? Chromium, GitLab, OpenOffice, etc? I feel like such applications inherently have more spaghetti because the human problems they're aiming to solve are less concretly scoped. Even…
NetHack's source code is absolutely beautiful. It's probably the most well-kept, well-designed, well-structured and well-implemented K&R C program in history. Although they are switching to ANSI syntax soon. It's even more amazing because NetHack is (1) a video game, where generally speaking code quality is sacrificed for efficiency, and (2) it has been developed by a constantly changing team of volunteers over the c…
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The Windows API was very ugly... not to mention unnecessarily complicated. It does not belong in this thread.
I have quite opposite opinion backed by real life experience. As an author of Sciter Engine that works on Windows, MacOS and Linux/GTK I have first hand experience working with all three API sets. Windows API is the most logical, complete and stable API among all others. It has everything that you really need to create performant and manageable UI. MacOS is good but less good. It uses reference counting (which is not…
It's preferable over garbage collection because there are no unexpected pauses/memory scans and it's deterministic.
ffmpeg https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg
libavformat is rather difficult to use and difficult to fix bugs in - you'll never find the bugs. Same with the ffmpeg frontend, which makes it easy to ask for something it's near impossible to get right, like copying an mkv file to an avi, it'll just corrupt your data silently.
Everything about the video decoders is great, but encoding never worked as well, which is why nobody uses ffmpeg2/4/etc and x264 is a separate project.
I'm really curious how you see laravel as a shining example of clean code? That thing is the epitome of a framework for frameworks sake. Pretty sure Most of Martin's talks begin by complaining about this sort of thing?
> That thing is the epitome of a framework for frameworks sake. Go on
PHP already is the "framework" and every time you load a page it's executing the script from scratch. You're wasting a lot of time loading a framework to handle control flow for your program which doesn't have any control flow in the first place.
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Second this; Postgres codebase is what got me out of the "good code is self documenting" nonsense. For those of us in the database space it is an incredible resource - and overall a great example of good code. sqlite is much less complex, but similarly approachable. In more recent examples, I think you see a lot of this same reader-centric pragmatic ethos in many Go projects. The Kubernetes codebase comes to mind as…
>the "good code is self documenting" nonsense Man I hate dogma like that. My "common sense" comment style is always, "code tells me how, comments tell me why." The only exception is in hand optimized code where I'll non-doc comment what the reference implementation would be above the optimized version, which is _sometimes_ necessary when tests aren't in the same translation unit.
For example, I can write "a - 1" or I can write "-1 + a". If I write the second form people are going to wonder why I did it that way. Is there some reason why "a - 1" wouldn't work? Perhaps I don't have a - operator for a for some reason. But if I have no reason to write it the second way, then I should avoid doing it because then I don't have to write a comment saying, "I did it this way for no reason".
That's a simple and contrived example, but it holds true for larger code as well. There are ways of doing things that follow the programming culture most of us share. We shouldn't comment everything we do -- only the things that are unusual. Otherwise we'll be lost in comments. I'd rather read code to understand what's going on than English if I can help it.
So, the lack of need to write comments can indicate a good code base. However, like many things, it's a poor metric. The lack of comments does not indicate a good code base ;-) Similarly, some things are just complex, or unusual even when you have simplified it as much as humanly possible. Generally speaking, though, if you have a choice between code that needs a comment and code that doesn't need a comment, choose the latter.