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Linus Torvalds: 'I Do No Coding Any More'

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Re: Linus Torvalds: 'I Do No Coding Any More'

#61

Post by zabzonk »

nullc wrote: post #49
dasil003 wrote: post #26

> commit messages to me are almost as important as the code change itself This is high on my list of code craftsmanship points. It's very difficult to explain to young programmers who have never worked on an old code base how valuable this is when done well. In fact, often you hear complaints about how a code base "is crap", but more often than not I'd wager this is just a result of the context at the time not being…

> about how a code base "is crap" Translation: "Not written in the particular arbitrary style that I'm used to", of course if it were written in that persons preferred style another arbitrarily selected novice would call the result crap. I've found this to be almost universally true especially when the claim is given forcefully but not immediately backed up with a litany of actual user-impacting serious problems. Thi…

> Not written in the particular arbitrary style that I'm used to

Like "arbitrary styles" such as "a function shall not be 500 lines long".

Re: Linus Torvalds: 'I Do No Coding Any More'

#63

Post by yxhuvud »

musingsole wrote: post #55
dasil003 wrote: post #26

> commit messages to me are almost as important as the code change itself This is high on my list of code craftsmanship points. It's very difficult to explain to young programmers who have never worked on an old code base how valuable this is when done well. In fact, often you hear complaints about how a code base "is crap", but more often than not I'd wager this is just a result of the context at the time not being…

Yeah, but 99% of projects aren't anywhere close to long lived. Most products fail to launch. Most products that launch shutter within a few years. Having a code base survive long enough in close enough to its original state for a commit message to be meaningful a year later is unlikely outside of a few cases. Also, this is all predicated on the business case for the software being well understood that it could be wri…

On the other hand, most people don't work at those short-lived projects. The vast majority of people work for profitable companies that have plenty of long lived code.

Re: Linus Torvalds: 'I Do No Coding Any More'

#64

Post by trade_unionist »

zabzonk wrote: post #61
nullc wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> about how a code base "is crap" Translation: "Not written in the particular arbitrary style that I'm used to", of course if it were written in that persons preferred style another arbitrarily selected novice would call the result crap. I've found this to be almost universally true especially when the claim is given forcefully but not immediately backed up with a litany of actual user-impacting serious problems. Thi…

> Not written in the particular arbitrary style that I'm used to Like "arbitrary styles" such as "a function shall not be 500 lines long".

Arbitrary like don't use reflection when a dll will do.

Re: Linus Torvalds: 'I Do No Coding Any More'

#66

Post by Retric »

zabzonk wrote: post #61
nullc wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> about how a code base "is crap" Translation: "Not written in the particular arbitrary style that I'm used to", of course if it were written in that persons preferred style another arbitrarily selected novice would call the result crap. I've found this to be almost universally true especially when the claim is given forcefully but not immediately backed up with a litany of actual user-impacting serious problems. Thi…

> Not written in the particular arbitrary style that I'm used to Like "arbitrary styles" such as "a function shall not be 500 lines long".

An individual function can quite reasonably be 500 lines long. A giant case statement handling routing is one example. More controversially, if I am gong to need to do a lot of ugly compatibility hacks then I prefer to consolidate them and thus keep most functions clean.

Re: Linus Torvalds: 'I Do No Coding Any More'

#67

Post by imtringued »

coliveira wrote: post #44
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I don't like about open source, it seems to encourage these sort of behaviours.

What I notice personally is that many users of OSS these days are professional programmers using open source on their corporate jobs. They are trying to push their requirements and expectations on people that are not paid to deal with them.

The company can implement their own feature requests. I've opened some issues on some frameworks and when the maintainers agree with the issue the first thing they ask you is if you can submit a PR. Alternatively you can wait or sometimes pay for high priority handling. If you are unlucky you might wait forever because other people create issues too and those might be more important than yours.

Re: Linus Torvalds: 'I Do No Coding Any More'

#68

Post by BurningFrog »

dasil003 wrote: post #26

> commit messages to me are almost as important as the code change itself This is high on my list of code craftsmanship points. It's very difficult to explain to young programmers who have never worked on an old code base how valuable this is when done well. In fact, often you hear complaints about how a code base "is crap", but more often than not I'd wager this is just a result of the context at the time not being…

The maybe most common problem with programmer comments or commit message is what I call "Assumed Context".

When you spend a few days deep in a problem, it's very easy to explain the finer details of it while forgetting the big picture of what does this module even do, what real world problem were we fixing, etc, because that has become completely self evident to you.

It's a bit like giving a street address without saying what city it's in.

I have trained myself to look at both code and comments in a "what if I was a new hire 6 months from now" mode, and it's an indispensable tool for me.

Re: Linus Torvalds: 'I Do No Coding Any More'

#70

Post by urxvtcd »

pengaru wrote: post #34
hasmolo wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen that useful commit message make it incredibly easy to see where the code came from and is going. It also never gets 'out of sync' like code comments tend to, as it's a comment on a static place in the code, not a dynamic one.

> It also never gets 'out of sync' like code comments tend to, as it's a comment on a static place in the code, not a dynamic one. That's simply not true, not in a git world where rebasing to rewrite history is standard practice.

The branches you rebase most of the time are your own topic branches, where you know what's going on. And they should be relatively short-lived.
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