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Comment by _bxg1 | Hacker News Reader

Honestly the only insane thing is that it's all in one file. Could've also been broken up into more functions (it seems like this person didn't actually want to be using Java), but it's reasonably named and formatted and they did a decent job separating out static data at the top instead of littering it throughout the code.

Oh, and that stream of comments by polytomous. That's... something.

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This kind of thing in particular is really interesting:

  public static void print(String text) {
    System.out.println(text);
  }

This person cares enough about brevity to make little wrapper functions like this, but at the same time everything is very procedural and monolithic. This gives a vague, weird sense of refined taste, despite some obvious problems with the artifact as a whole.

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the programmer came from a C background (where brevity tends to be valued and abstractions tend not to be) and used Java because it's cross-platform.

That's not bad, actually. It's one reason why I hated leaving Perl for Python. Python is a little too orthodox sometimes.

What I'm seeing is where frameworks are becoming the new "programming languages". People now bicker over what framework to use rather than first master the language they are using for a task. I tend to favor the method of "do the simplest thing that works".

totally should have been called p(...)

I'd bet they made that function so they had a single place to intervene on text being written, not necessarily for the brevity/aesthetics.

Given the extreme lack of abstraction elsewhere, I highly doubt it.

I can understand that slightly. Back in college when I was doing a lot of Java if the IDE hadn't had a shortcut to auto complete System.out.println() I probably would have either made it as a macro or defined a function like that in a library (or in a block I would paste in every single project if we're being completely honest).

Does Java have macros now?

No a macro in my editor. Most text editors will have some capability to do user defined text replacements.

"treating it like a friend, like a spider u know? not gonna kill it but also gonna make sure the webs arent in ur personal space" lol

That Polytomous is a magnificent troll. They acknowledge the code is awful in their fork's README. Also, their prose is much clearer and more comprehensible in the same README. They must have been putting on a character in that thread.

https://github.com/polytomous/TerrariaClone

It’s actually pretty great because they’re a person who has worked on the code, acting insane in an issue “Anyone who looks at this code instantly becomes insane”.

If that’s not some very clever trolling, I’m not sure what is.

And what dedication! Pretty funny.

I think i had a polytomous account on the orange site, but forgot the creds. This is what i settled on in the interim. I dont put on a character, if my acting theory is anything its a derivation of neofuturism.

Even OP is telling them to pump their brakes. Anyone who doesn't have a sense of humor about their younger self's code probably still writes the same quality spaghetti.

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