Ask HN: Do you ever go back and admire a piece of code you wrote? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Do you ever go back and admire a piece of code you wrote?

#31

Post by gumballhead » Fri, May 08, 2020, 10:39 AM UTC

vxxzy wrote: post #8

Yes. Early on in my career, I needed a function that produced a range of dates, given a start and end date. After it was all said and done, it boiled out like so: def daterange(start,end): while start Though simplistic and straightforward, I admire the solution. I am sure there may be “better” ways to achieve the same result, and posting this here may result in cowboys trashing it or pointing out a fallacy - oh well.…

What's cool about this is now that you have a date generator, you can apply all kinds of fun things to your date ranges with Python's standard library.

Apply generator expressions, format them with map, filter out weekends, anything in itertools (dropwhile, takewhile), etc.

I wrote a datepicker to demonstrate some concepts like lazy evaluation with JavaScript generators and it was fun coming up with the test cases.

https://github.com/gumballhead/datepicker/blob/master/src/it...

Re: Ask HN: Do you ever go back and admire a piece of code you wrote?

#32

Post by mkl » Fri, May 08, 2020, 10:44 AM UTC

declnz wrote: post #20

ejflick wrote: post #11

The only thing I have ever gone back and admired is when I wrote the following snippet of code: long time; // no see

Hehe, well if we're going here there are various go-to shell commands / filenames / hostnames I inevitably end up using at some point just for the wry smile: $ PONG=1.1.1.1; ping $PONG $ more cowbell $ cat dog | tee hee And my favourite choice of empty file: $ touch me Also I was fairly please years ago when I briefly re-aliased cd to something that could do "the right thing" (TM): $ cd ... $ cd ..../src/ etc..

"cd ..." etc. worked in 4DOS, an alternative (and extended) DOS shell: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4DOS.

Re: Ask HN: Do you ever go back and admire a piece of code you wrote?

#33

Post by ak39 » Fri, May 08, 2020, 10:45 AM UTC

ejflick wrote: post #11

The only thing I have ever gone back and admired is when I wrote the following snippet of code: long time; // no see

That's worth printing on a t-shirt. :)

Re: Ask HN: Do you ever go back and admire a piece of code you wrote?

#34

Post by delta1 » Fri, May 08, 2020, 10:56 AM UTC

ejflick wrote: post #11

The only thing I have ever gone back and admired is when I wrote the following snippet of code: long time; // no see

This gem in a Flash frame (Actionscript)

    stop(); // hammer time

Re: Ask HN: Do you ever go back and admire a piece of code you wrote?

#35

Post by unnouinceput » Fri, May 08, 2020, 10:58 AM UTC

I'm opposite. Never ever I felt proud of my code, I always am critical of it and thinking in the back of my head "I know how to refactor it even better". It's a never-ending story for me. And whenever happen to do maintenance of a old project of mine from years ago I cringe of the way I implemented some stuff and plenty of times I have to restrain myself to not refactor it since the client wants only a simple change while the refactoring would eat away my free time.

Re: Ask HN: Do you ever go back and admire a piece of code you wrote?

#36

Post by overkalix » Fri, May 08, 2020, 11:00 AM UTC

I wouldn't say admire. When I stumble upon code from many years ago I (somewhat painfully) realize I've lost a lot of the ingenuity I used in my early days. I read the code and find myself thinking "how the hell did I come up with that solution". I didn't care about finding the optimal algo/ds, I would just use whatever I knew at that moment without a second thought. Now I have to care a lot more about writing code that looks smart and learning "new" frameworks.

Re: Ask HN: Do you ever go back and admire a piece of code you wrote?

#37

Post by rsrx » Fri, May 08, 2020, 11:01 AM UTC

All the time. I put pride in my code. I worked in various teams and codebases and came to appreciate the quality of my code.

Re: Ask HN: Do you ever go back and admire a piece of code you wrote?

#38

Post by _8j50 » Fri, May 08, 2020, 11:03 AM UTC

I do reminisce,but do the opposite of admire, perhaps because my day job has never been primarily to write code.

Re: Ask HN: Do you ever go back and admire a piece of code you wrote?

#39

Post by parenthesis » Fri, May 08, 2020, 11:04 AM UTC

e_carra wrote: post #30

parenthesis wrote: post #14

I immediately think of my very simple 17-line constraint satisfaction problem solver which has saved me so much work.

Would you mind sharing it? I am really curious.

I can't share the code.

It is just a really dumb search for a random solution. (I don't want to get the same solution or solutions each time.) The domains (which are always pretty small) for the variables are randomly shuffled first, so the search can just iterate through the domains.

The problems mostly have a large number of solutions out of the total space, so finding a solution is fast.

The real beauty is then being able to write short declarative code, which is very easy to write, read and modify (I'm not always sure in advance exactly what the constraints should be). None of which would be the case for the code which would construct a solution, even though it might run a little faster.

Re: Ask HN: Do you ever go back and admire a piece of code you wrote?

#40

Post by Ayesh » Fri, May 08, 2020, 11:06 AM UTC

One of my very first was Inna domain parking app, that it tried to "fertilize" any domain that was pointed to the server. It would obtain feeds piped via Yahoo feeds for keywords from the domain, and sell the domains later at higher price for the slightly better SEO value.

I still love the domain parser I had there. I actively tried to avoid regex by the time, and I had a huge validator that brings tears to my eyes. I admire it because this can be written with a single regex, but I am sure I spent an hour or two working on this, carefully planning about public suffixes, IDN conversion, host headers, etc.