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What is “good taste” in software engineering?

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

#61

Post by Yoric »

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'll have to disagree.

Developers coming from functional programming and developers coming from C programming, for instance, have very different definitions of "readable", and neither is obviously wrong.

Similarly, developers used to channel-based, async-based or mutex-based concurrent programming will all have very different criteria for "readable" code, again none of them obviously wrong.

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

#63

Post by yegle »

How to distinguish "good taste" vs "opinionated" though?

If you can articulate why certain code is better with convincing justifications, I would say that's "good taste". Coding styles are often examples of these.

But if you can't articulate or don't have a convincing reasoning for preferring certain coding patterns, isn't it just "opinionated"?

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

#64

Post by atoav »

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…

Code readability isn't a metric. It is a tradeoff. It basically boils down to: if in doubt will that programmer go with the more readable version of the code or do they stick with the slightly terse, clever hack?

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

#65

Post by OhMeadhbh »

jackblemming wrote: post #24
OhMeadhbh wrote: post #18

I would say limiting the braggadocio is important to "good taste" as well. I interviewed once for a dev role on the email team for a very large free software company you've heard of. The team's egos were so large I could hardly fit in the room. "Oh! I see you wrote the control system for a nuclear power plant. That's cute, I once inverted a tree data structure!" or "I see you wrote the modular exponentiator that was…

Your phrasing makes it sound like you’re playing the same childish game they are; you just rank yourself higher than them.

so... you're suggesting I take things off my resume to avoid making interviewers feel bad?

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

#66

Post by necklesspen »

whstl wrote: post #37
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.

Meaningless in the context of an outfit - not necessarily whether the garment itself may have meaning to someone. You may surely be in possession of a couple of random trinkets of great historic significance but if you just mesh them all together into one outfit you might simply end up with a mess on your hands. A garment may well be the centerpiece of an outfit - but it is ultimately always the combination that is important.

Im sure you've seen examples of this yourself - you can absolutely sport a Ray Ban in good taste and you've almost surely seen someone believe themselves to be fashionable because they are wearing a Ray Ban.

Also, I'm not suggesting fashion as a whole is about combing outfits - merely that being able to combine varying pieces of clothing into a cohesive whole is an expression of good taste.

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

#67

Post by imiric »

epolanski wrote: post #43

> Are functions relatively short and named well? I was hoping we moved beyond this "clean code"-ish nonsense of functions having to be short. Quality of a software design, maintainability, etc, have virtually no relation to length of functions and the most respectable software out there contain functions hundreds if not thousands of lines of code long without being impacted by its own weight.

Eh, hard disagree. (Though I didn't downvote you, since it's silly to downvote out of disagreement...)

Readability, while subjective, plays a large role in software maintenance. Developers will be more reluctant to change code they don't understand, and more likely to introduce bugs. "Long" functions require following large blocks of code that work within the same context, and relying on comments to explain functionality, which could be wrong or outdated, rather than descriptive function names.

Also, "long" functions are typically difficult to test. They either require complex setup and mocking, or are only tested under very specific conditions in end-to-end tests, if at all. Chances are that only users are actually testing them, which is not a good place to be.

We can argue whether "AI" tools help with this or not, but while humans are still reading and writing code, following standard conventions of keeping functions relatively "short", "clean" (whatever those terms mean for you and your team), and with a single purpose, makes maintenance and testing easier, and, in turn, produces more robust and higher quality software.

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

#68

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#69

Post by t43562 »

imiric wrote: post #45

I like the article. Most engineering decisions are indeed a tradeoff that should be carefully considered. That said... > I will always distrust engineers who justify decisions by saying “it’s best practice”. No engineering decision is “best practice” in all contexts! You have to make the right decision for the specific problem you’re facing. There are indeed general best practices that are applicable to most, if not…

It gets used whenever someone doesn't like something for a reason of personal taste and people who don't really know (like your boss) immediate fixate on it and think "well, we must do that then and why is the other guy (you) suggesting that it doesn't apply in this case? Best practises ALWAYS apply surely? I will have a quiet word with him about standards..."

IOW it's a short circuit to not justifying something. If something is best practise you can explain why it suits the current situation and if you can't explain why then it doesn't matter.

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

#70

Post by atoav »

mojuba wrote: post #31
zx8080 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 day…

Sure, but we do agree that Hello World is MORE¹ readable in Python compared to the equivalent program in say Brainfuck?

  print("Hello World")
vs

  ++++++++[>++++[>++>+++>+++>++>+>->>+[>.>---.+++++++..+++.>>.>+.>++.
¹: more readable means easier/faster to read for most human beings that know the language
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