By some strange coincidence, I plan on waking up some morning next week. Meanwhile, a typical response I get, when I admit to some random person that I have some knowledge about computers is: "Can you fix my printer?"
Other responses have had to do with finding someone a job and getting a thermostat to work properly... It's not just that none of these cases involve reading code (something I happen to enjoy, as long as I can pace myself properly, and as long as the code relates to my interests - which are fairly broad, as long as it doesn't involve legal headaches). It's that so much code is proprietary - people actually pay for code that they are not allowed to read nor maintain, and where all access is gated through people who apparently have no idea what the code even does. Meanwhile, I've spent decades of my life trying to develop maintainable and decently documented systems, only to see them be ignored because of decisions being made by people who basically don't know and don't care and don't care to know. Still, in my experience, maintainable code has very little to do with bloating the code with huge unmanageable indirection and has a lot to do with simplification and clear coherent examples. Going with long names also can help, sometimes, but it can hurt as easily as it can help. Maybe even more easily. But given how businesses work - where everyone has different criteria and nothing can please everyone - I'm not sure it even matters. -- Raul On Tue, Jul 15, 2014 at 11:10 AM, Erling Hellenäs <[email protected]> wrote: > Programs tend to have users? When the programmer is finished he leaves? > After a while someone is supposed to maintain 5 millions lines of code? Fix > bugs and make needed changes? Wake up, if you write a decent program it's > used for ages, and you're not there to explain it. It must be documented? > The code must be self-explanatory? /Erling > > > On 2014-07-15 16:58, Raul Miller wrote: > >> Here's an excellent writeup that I think is relevant in the context of >> readability: >> >> http://prog21.dadgum.com/87.html >> >> > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
