On Thursday, 21 November 2013 at 03:15:16 UTC, Walter Bright
wrote:
On 11/20/2013 5:45 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
In this context "objectively worse" means "all reasonable
people would say it's
worse".
It could also be objectively measured as:
1. results in more bugs
2. takes people longer to get up to speed with code written
that way
You need to prove first that it results in more bugs because of
inherent code style traits, not preferences of target audience.
Otherwise you can have a potential code style which is
objectively good for one measured group of programmers and
objectively bad for other. Which contradicts the definition of
"objectivity".
There is nothing terrible about being only subjectively worse /
better. Code style exists only to help people and it is
completely natural that its applicability is evaluated in people
context. But that is a different thing with different name.
Same with your plane example - as described, one case wasn't
objectively worse than another (or probably was but it wasn't
checked). But as it is all about pilots (who are very alive
subjects), subjective comparison is important enough to make the
change and resulted in real practical improvement.
