Hacker News Reader

Comment by kemiller2002 | Hacker News Reader

kemiller2002

I know I'm in the minority, but I honestly never really understood why people get so up in arms about this. People keep saying it's so difficult to read, and I just don't understand why. I know that linters and such can catch this most of the time, but a lot of places I've seen don't use them. (I don't know why, that's a whole other discussion.) It just seems to me that it's something that keeps you from wasting time on silly mistakes should be common place. I really don't understand.

View on HN

You must be young, friend. The holy wars that used to rage over just where to put curly brackets...

(And then Python came along and was like, "U wot mate?", and there were had little wars over "syntactically-significant indentation" and tabs vs. spaces, and how many spaces... And on, and on...)

Just wait until people realize proportional fonts are actually easier to read than mono-spaced fonts.

Oh no, I'm not young. I just find this particular argument makes less sense than all the other types of arguments like this. Bracket placement in some languages is necessary to not have unintended effect. Tabs vs spaces can cause problems with certain ides/editors. I can somewhat understand most justifications as to why people have a certain reason for formatting code in their particular way. You want me to indent 3 spaces instead of 2 in Delphi, because that's the way you've done it, fine. I don't care. But this particular one, I don't get it. I never have. The amount of time that this one particular trick saved me in terms of time and frustration is huge. When you spend 45 minutes tracking down a problem because you assigned 5 (or something) to variable by accident, it almost always leads to a mouse throwing event. When someone comes back and says that seeing 42 == x is too difficult to read even though it can save countless hours, I just don't understand. (not every project has the benefit of having a linter or a compiler that will catch things like this.)

I see what you're saying, in this case there's real benefit to doing it one way rather than the other. But if that was enough to get people to change we would all be using better languages and tools, eh?

I got lucky I think. The first time I saw "yoda" conditions I had an abreaction. But then I realized the programmer who wrote it was "a foreigner, with ways different than our own." That somehow made it alright again.

Virginia Satir said that people would choose the familiar even over death. She said the strongest human drive is for the familiar.

Jef Raskin pointed out that the way we use the word "intuitive" it really means "familiar". The first time he handed a mouse to someone to try, who hadn't previously seen it in use, she turned it over and used it like a little trackball.

I'm pretty sure the only reason we don't all use Lisp is just human drive for what's already familiar.

Code is for humans. If your language lets you make silly mistakes maybe it needs to stop doing that. Why can I assign during a branch? It's unnecessary.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com