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Please do not attempt to simplify this code

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Re: Please do not attempt to simplify this code

#61

Post by topmonk »

startupdiscuss wrote: post #3

The comment:code ratio is higher than anything I write or that I’ve seen. However, it does give me some comfort. When it’s not gamed, do other HNers also feel that a high comment:code ratio probably indicates quality? There are reasons why this may be the case. (More thought, more time and a large team etc) I don’t advocate using this measure to reward anyone because it would be gamed immediately.

I think repeating the same concept in different ways just makes things harder to read, not easier. Comments also sometimes reference code outside of where they are placed. This leads to them becoming misleading and incorrect.

I find that comments can be a last ditch effort to make hacky convoluted code look better than it is. It can be an indication of lack of thought and planning and later obsessive documentation to make up for it.

Re: Please do not attempt to simplify this code

#62

Post by dajonker »

topmonk wrote: post #34
dajonker wrote: post #16

"it became clear that we needed to ensure that every single condition was handled and accounted for in the code" This is a feature of several (mostly functional) programming languages, e.g. Haskell. Fun to see that often people figure out that these types of concepts are a smart way to write your code. Too bad it usually means many people reinvent the wheel instead of learning about computer science history and other…

Why do you say Haskell is an example of this? You can return undefined for anything, and have incomplete pattern matching, where if you don't mention a particular case, there is a runtime crash. An example would be head, which takes the first element of a list and throws an error on an empty list. I really love Haskell but it seems as if they are going for something different here than what Haskell provides.

My point was not really to mention a particular programming language, but rather to make the point that people seem to continuously reinvent the wheel rather than reading up on history and investigating other programming languages. If you only know C/Java/Python/Go and you learn about , it will probably make you a better programmer even if you never write a single line of .

Re: Please do not attempt to simplify this code

#64

Post by twunde »

startupdiscuss wrote: post #3

The comment:code ratio is higher than anything I write or that I’ve seen. However, it does give me some comfort. When it’s not gamed, do other HNers also feel that a high comment:code ratio probably indicates quality? There are reasons why this may be the case. (More thought, more time and a large team etc) I don’t advocate using this measure to reward anyone because it would be gamed immediately.

It's really only useful in areas of codebases that either a) are very complex, b) touched by many people or c) both. When that happens, everyone prefers that there is a lot of documentation, especially about the why. With older codebases the question is always whether this is an actual bug from the developer or is there a reason why it's doing this super-weird thing and if so is it still applicable. What's happened over the last 5 years is that automated testing has become so mainstream that places without tests are the exception AND the tests have replaced the need for comments.

Re: Please do not attempt to simplify this code

#65

Post by natalyarostova »

geofft wrote: post #55
kraftman wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'A comment is a failure to express yourself in code. If you fail, then write a comment; but try not to fail.' - https://twitter.com/unclebobmartin/status/870311898545258497... And a bit more on the same from clean code: http://www.kyleblaney.com/software-blog/2012/6/29/comments-a...

How do you successfully express "We need to treat all transactions on February 29 as happening on February 28, see customer ticket #4321 for rationale" in code?

def we_need_to_treat_all_transactions_on_february_29_as happening_on_February_28_see_customer_ticket_#4321_for rationale:

obviously

Re: Please do not attempt to simplify this code

#66

Post by Klathmon »

afarrell wrote: post #42
Klathmon wrote: post #21

I love this! It's the "jazz music" of software development. Something which breaks all the "rules" but does so purposefully and explicitly so that it can become better than the "rules" allow. A naive look at this and my head is screaming that this file is way too big, has way too many branches and nested if statements, has a lot of "pointless comments" that just describe what the line or few lines around it is doing,…

> probably a hell of a lot easier to maintain and manage than splitting the logic up among tens or hundreds of files I'm only halfway through John Ousterhout's book Philosophy of Software Design but I think it agrees with you on this -- that smallness-of-file or smallness-of-function is not a target to shoot for because it prevents the things you build from being deep. That you should strive to build modules which ha…

Now i'm squarely in frontend web-app development right now which definitely changes things (mainly the complexity is centered around enabling fast changes/additions to the codebase, and not the actual business logic for the most part), but while "deep functionality and small interfaces" sounds good on paper, most of the time giant files with a few functions exported aren't a good way to manage that.

Sure, it solves the problem when viewed from the outside. "users" of the software (users being other devs in this case) get a nice small interface and docs that explain how to use it, but internally it's much harder to work with. Having everything in one file like this without breaking it into "sub modules" for various parts of the module means that you need to almost have a complete understanding of the module before working on it.

In this case, I have a feeling that is a pro not a con. Because this file is so core to the system, and has so much complexity, that breaking it up into smaller parts could cause a dev to feel like they understand it only to find out they don't after it's released. And it means that any devs that truly do understand it top-to-bottom would just waste a lot of time switching around files if it were split up.

Putting it all in the same file here nudges you to really make sure you understand it top to bottom before making any big changes. It's intimidating and scary for a reason, because at its core it is a complex piece of code, and dressing it up in "simple code's clothing" won't help.

Re: Please do not attempt to simplify this code

#67

Post by progval »

endymi0n wrote: post #50
dajonker wrote: post #16

"it became clear that we needed to ensure that every single condition was handled and accounted for in the code" This is a feature of several (mostly functional) programming languages, e.g. Haskell. Fun to see that often people figure out that these types of concepts are a smart way to write your code. Too bad it usually means many people reinvent the wheel instead of learning about computer science history and other…

I know a business coach who regularly asks his audience "Who here makes better burgers than McDonalds?". When half the audience raises their hand, he asks them why they don't outsell this giant company. Functional programming advocats, especially for the "pure" ones like Haskell, always strike me as odd. It seems that all the beauty of those languages make people obsess over that beauty and purity while keeping them…

> Now if I _ever_ came across a useful Haskell product

There's at least git-annex and pandoc

Re: Please do not attempt to simplify this code

#68

Post by Koshkin »

geofft wrote: post #58
newnewpdro wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I do not find it indicates quality. To me, comments are noise, and code is signal; the code is what actually executes. It's one thing to have a summary of intent at the start of a listing, that should not count towards the code:comments ratio. Once the code begins however, there should be a minimum of comments necessary - especially in a high-level language not constrained to assembly-level instructions. In assem…

Why do you want to abort when prio is in endidle or busy, and not in other cases?

Exactly. True, code could be self-explanatory, but sometimes you need to explain why code does what it does.

Re: Please do not attempt to simplify this code

#69

Post by root_axis »

endymi0n wrote: post #50
dajonker wrote: post #16

"it became clear that we needed to ensure that every single condition was handled and accounted for in the code" This is a feature of several (mostly functional) programming languages, e.g. Haskell. Fun to see that often people figure out that these types of concepts are a smart way to write your code. Too bad it usually means many people reinvent the wheel instead of learning about computer science history and other…

I know a business coach who regularly asks his audience "Who here makes better burgers than McDonalds?". When half the audience raises their hand, he asks them why they don't outsell this giant company. Functional programming advocats, especially for the "pure" ones like Haskell, always strike me as odd. It seems that all the beauty of those languages make people obsess over that beauty and purity while keeping them…

I agree with the general sentiment of your post, but the idea that Kafka is somehow less painful to operate than Rabbit is ridiculous. I love Kafka, but I can't think of a more painful software to maintain in production.

Re: Please do not attempt to simplify this code

#70

Post by nightski »

topmonk wrote: post #34
dajonker wrote: post #16

"it became clear that we needed to ensure that every single condition was handled and accounted for in the code" This is a feature of several (mostly functional) programming languages, e.g. Haskell. Fun to see that often people figure out that these types of concepts are a smart way to write your code. Too bad it usually means many people reinvent the wheel instead of learning about computer science history and other…

Why do you say Haskell is an example of this? You can return undefined for anything, and have incomplete pattern matching, where if you don't mention a particular case, there is a runtime crash. An example would be head, which takes the first element of a list and throws an error on an empty list. I really love Haskell but it seems as if they are going for something different here than what Haskell provides.

That's not really a limitation of the "language" but more of an implementation detail of GHC and Prelude imo. There are very few escape hatches from the type system and you can run the compiler so that these cases are treated as a compile time error.
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