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What is “good taste” in software engineering?

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Re: What is “good taste” in software engineering?

#31

Post by mojuba »

zx8080 wrote: post #23
mojuba wrote: post #20

> Is the software easy to take in at a glance and to onboard new engineers to? This is not as easy as it sounds. Who are those "new engineers", juniors? 10 years of experience? 30 years? What's your requirement? "Readability" is such a wildcard, with a whole range of acceptable levels from zero to infinity. Readability is a non-concept really. Maxwell's famous equations are readable to some and absolutely impenetrabl…

Theere are two quite a widespread classes of not readable code: Some code is not readable by _anyone_. That's not readable code. Some code is readable by its author only (be it AI or a human). That's also not readable one. Saying readability is not a concept is really strange.

I have a formal proof for you that it is a non-concept. If code can be read and interpreted by a computer, it means it can in principle be read by a human. There are of course some edge cases like obfuscated JavaScript or binary executable that some people are able to read and understand.

The question comes down to being reasonably readable and we are back to square one: "reasonable" is very relative. In my early days I could read 8086 binary code (in hex) and understand what it does, it was literally at the very edge of readability but it wasn't unreadable.

Re: What is “good taste” in software engineering?

#32

Post by mojuba »

ibash wrote: post #25
mojuba wrote: post #20

> Is the software easy to take in at a glance and to onboard new engineers to? This is not as easy as it sounds. Who are those "new engineers", juniors? 10 years of experience? 30 years? What's your requirement? "Readability" is such a wildcard, with a whole range of acceptable levels from zero to infinity. Readability is a non-concept really. Maxwell's famous equations are readable to some and absolutely impenetrabl…

I disagree. The ability of someone to read code doesn't grow exponentially, after a few years of experience everyone hits the same plateau. More years of experience does not mean you can understand more complex code. That is to say, if you target "readable to the majority of engineers with 3-4 years of experience, without them getting confused" then you've hit the mark.

> after a few years of experience everyone hits the same plateau

I'm sorry this is a very naive take, I presume (I could be wrong) coming from someone with just a few years of experience.

Re: What is “good taste” in software engineering?

#33

Post by djmips »

mojuba wrote: post #20

> Is the software easy to take in at a glance and to onboard new engineers to? This is not as easy as it sounds. Who are those "new engineers", juniors? 10 years of experience? 30 years? What's your requirement? "Readability" is such a wildcard, with a whole range of acceptable levels from zero to infinity. Readability is a non-concept really. Maxwell's famous equations are readable to some and absolutely impenetrabl…

Speaking of those equations, as he wrote them they were considered rather impenatrable and the modern ones are considered much more beautiful and 'readable' but that was the work of Heaviside and others.

Re: What is “good taste” in software engineering?

#34

Post by gyulai »

antirez wrote: post #13
gyulai wrote: post #9

Lecturing on "good taste" is a huge red flag for narcissism. "Taste" implies subjectivity. Pairing it with "good" is presupposing something along the lines of "my subjective evaluation of things is superior to yours", or "my subjective choices are superior to yours".

That's exactly how it works in most fields that are not purely engineering but where the space of design solutions to do X is huge. Architecture, software development, ...

If I correctly catch the drift of your argument, you're saying “engineering is objective”, so there is such a thing as a right and wrong choice in any given situation. ...well, to the extent that that's true, the word “taste” is a poor choice of words then. Actually, I think that's the case for this article. I think the article is fine, but the title and “taste” as a choice of word is not great. The article is more about intellectual humility and subordinating your individual priorities underneath the requirements of the project, which is all perfectly fine.

There are some domains where the word “taste” can still properly be applied, for example “vi vs emacs” comes down to individual taste. But then, “emacs people have poor taste” is something that only a narcissist would say. (The “narcissism of small differences” is a well-studied phenomenon).

Or perhaps one uses this choice of words because one feels some sympathy for people who say this in other domains, like “This room, filled with IKEA furniture and film memorabilia, was decorated in poor taste”

… either way, the red flag seems to stick.

The reason it's worth mentioning is that the notion seems to be catching on, and I've seen it applied, for example, in hiring decisions, where I think it's quite dangerous and counterproductive. It lends itself to rationalizing hiring only like-minded people, even where there is no objective ground for preferring one candidate to another.

Re: What is “good taste” in software engineering?

#37

Post by whstl »

necklesspen wrote: post #21

When used in the domain of fashion "good taste" describes someone who has a unique way of selecting clothes that just mesh well together - clothes that by themselves independently are meaningless, no matter their make or quality, but when combined together create a powerful effect - much greater than the sum of their parts. I was hoping the article would go in that direction - what subjective combination is a softwar…

I don't agree with the statement that clothes can be "by themselves independently are meaningless". Garments carry cultural, historical and symbolic weight even before they're combined. And fashion is hardly mainly about combining outfits.

And fashion is a lot about tradeoffs too. Not just in the production, but also in the day to day wearing and mix-and-matching part.

Re: What is “good taste” in software engineering?

#39

Post by marginalia_nu »

The portable definition of good taste in software development is likely something like fitness to purpose, i.e. how well does the taste lend itself to producing good software, where good software in turn is software that does what it is indented to do.

If you want to go more concrete than that, you need additional parameters, otherwise you risk ending up with a broken compass that only points north in organizations similar in size and other properties to the ones you've worked in before.

Re: What is “good taste” in software engineering?

#40

Post by Daub »

I'm not entirely sure what op means by good taste in this context.

If we can seperate good taste from best practice, it's that good taste is commonly associated with restraint and economy. Hence, no one can say that Liberace or Elvis had good taste. On the other hand best practice is primarily governed by efficiency and is driven by commonly practiced principles.

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