Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Applying the Linus Torvalds “Good Taste” Coding Requirement

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 302 posts

Re: Applying the Linus Torvalds “Good Taste” Coding Requirement

#231

Post by tbabb »

danielsamuels wrote: post #119
tomerv wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's my fix: for (i = 0; i This way, for every row/column, the loop acts on all but the last cell, which is actually the first cell of some other column/row.

I feel like for the each side you could actually handle two items per iteration, one forwards _and_ one backwards. That way your iteration count could be halved.

That doesn't reduce the number of cells touched, and would make the algorithm more complicated. It would also probably hurt cache locality. Going backwards is also pointless complication, you could just as easily cut into two sections and go forward in both.

And furthermore why split in two? Why not split the range into three sections, or four, or N and completely unroll the loop?

Probably not a good-tasting construct at all.

Re: Applying the Linus Torvalds “Good Taste” Coding Requirement

#232

Post by Noseshine »

YCode wrote: post #154
Noseshine wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make claim after claim, and I think they do need substantiating evidence. After all, I find it highly unlikely that if he were even 10% as bad as you make it sound he would be the head of one of the most successful projects - especially since everybody working with him does so voluntarily. There would have been breaks long ago. The fact that the Linux kernel held together under the original author loudly speaks a…

Some food for thought: http://www.computerworld.com/article/3004387/it-management/h... "I’m not a nice person, and I don’t care about you. I care about the technology and the kernel — that’s what’s important to me."

See what I already wrote. This is like marketing research - what do you believe, what people tell you or the data about what they actually do? Because the data say what I already wrote. So you might as well interpret this as "Linus is a very humble guy" and have better support from the data.

Or, alternatively, you can believe that a really mean person who doesn't care about others and behaves badly still managed to hold the kernel developers together. Sure, a single or even a few discontent developers can't easily fork the kernel - but if there would really have been a problem even a tenth as large as claimed by some (and I've never seen any of them actually having had any personal contact with Linus) they would long ago have forked. See node.js/io.js, OpenOffice, and other prominent examples for what happens when developers are not satisfied with the project's leadership.

Re: Applying the Linus Torvalds “Good Taste” Coding Requirement

#234

Post by akkartik »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #56
akkartik wrote: post #13

I dunno, the first example seems unsatisfying. The original has that ugly condition, the "good" version seems overly clever. And for all the talk of taste and aesthetics, both versions ignore an elephant in the room: defensively dealing with `entry` being absent from the list. Not that I've never abused addresses like this. But having written this multiple times, I currently prefer something like this: remove_list_en…

An early exit is not the worst thing in the world, but an edge case is still an edge case. And if you have full "end of list" checks you make it even worse because now you're doing that in two places too. And if you do something with the entry, now that's in two places. Sure, the case where it's the head of the list is simpler by itself. But treating it specially means more code, and more duplication, and it's not ev…

1. "The algorithm" is the same in all cases here: a linear scan with a look-behind of 1. We're just talking about how the algorithm gets translated into code.

2. My point wasn't about the `for` loop: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12798192

3. Yes, I don't do any error handling and neither does Linus. I wasn't trying to bring up the importance of error handling. I was trying to bring up the importance of avoiding undefined behavior. "Segfault" was shorthand for that. Dereferencing NULL is undefined behavior. I mostly don't care about "taste", but showing undefined behavior while talking about taste seems egregious.

4. Finally, I don't get nearly as hung up about "duplication" as most programmers: http://www.sandimetz.com/blog/2016/1/20/the-wrong-abstractio.... I realize this is still a minority opinion, but we own the future. (This comment has a bunch of duplicated 'e's, but we both agree that that's unimportant to "DRY" out. Your concerns strike me as similar. When you try to minimize the number of occurrences of "x != NULL" you're doing Hamming compression, not programming.)

Re: Applying the Linus Torvalds “Good Taste” Coding Requirement

#235

Post by agentgt »

sidlls wrote: post #205
agentgt wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I say screw 'taste' and 'obvious' and instead go for it has high coverage unit tests and lots of them . You can always go back and make it look pretty safely with good tests. I just love code snobs that think their code is so good they don't need tests.

Counterpoint: test code is also code and when unit test tyrants rule a team it can easily break down into a mess of maintenance (which suddenly more than doubles).

Speaking of good "taste" you could apply your "taste" to what are worthy tests and what are not (ie adding just maintenance). The fact of the matter is you need some sort of testing to happen or some sort of proof that your code works on a continuous basis and if you don't have that to happen IMO I'm not going to say it is good code particularly when it is based solely on one persons opinion of what is good looking code. Aesthetics compared to performance, readability and automated testing are pretty low on my list. You may say aesthetics brings those characteristics and it might but lets have some tests to prove it.

As for maintenance and test code being invalid it doesn't have to be as buggy and in fact can be even in done in a data driven style or declaratively. Besides if it is a true unit test you should have written the test. If its your code and you have such good "taste" shouldn't it not "break down into a mess"?

There are plenty of projects like SQL Lite, and jQuery that have excellent "taste" not just because of the quality of code but because of the test coverage. Oh and I won't go downvote people who disagree (which my parent seems to be) because I hold that to be poor in "taste" IMO.

Re: Applying the Linus Torvalds “Good Taste” Coding Requirement

#236

Post by jeremiep »

kilburn wrote: post #219
colanderman wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anyone's mentioned that there are two functional benefits to Linus's version: testability and performance. The author touched on testability. Dropping the "if" case eliminates one code path that may contain bugs. But also, the revised code may perform a lot better if you're searching a lot of short lists. In that case, the target item has a large, though not likely, chance of being first in the list. Th…

I'm not a low level programmer, so this is a honest question. In the better version, why doesn't the while condition (that must be tested at least once) present predictability problems whereas the if check in parent does?

The first version had a while loop and a condition. On the other hand, the optimized version only has a while loop.

Re: Applying the Linus Torvalds “Good Taste” Coding Requirement

#239

Post by PeCaN »

0xdeadbeefbabe wrote: post #194
astrobe_ wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be it kernel programming or Forth, the cultural shock can hit hard. Most programming languages try their best to make things easier than easy, in order to maximize programmers' productivity. The focus on this parameter alone over-promotes the "worse is better" or "good enough" mindset. That doesn't fare well with kernel programming. It's even worse with Forth. As soon as your "word" (function in Forth lingo) has to d…

Forth was practical when it was invented though.

Still is practical, OpenBoot/OpenFirmware is still what boots big IBM POWER servers. Not sure if Oracle still uses it but Sun did.

OpenBoot is basically like UEFI but less complex and written in a Forth dialect. It's quite cool.

Re: Applying the Linus Torvalds “Good Taste” Coding Requirement

#240

Post by firethief »

akkartik wrote: post #13

I dunno, the first example seems unsatisfying. The original has that ugly condition, the "good" version seems overly clever. And for all the talk of taste and aesthetics, both versions ignore an elephant in the room: defensively dealing with `entry` being absent from the list. Not that I've never abused addresses like this. But having written this multiple times, I currently prefer something like this: remove_list_en…

There's a compromise enterprise developers should recognize from CS classes that's almost elegant enough for the kernel crowd: use a sentinel node for the element before the head. The edge case is eliminated, and no more &(*)->; ASCII Cthulhu.
Post reply on HN