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Comment by Stratoscope | Hacker News Reader

This is one of the things I appreciate about using a proportional font for coding. Nothing stops you from having a big fat O and a little skinny 0, just like you see right here in your comment and mine with HN's Verdana font. You don't have to have every character stuffed into the same fixed size box.

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I can't imagine trying to code without being able to align characters on different rows...

Show me an example where you need to do that, and maybe I can suggest an alternative.

Or I will say "yup, you got me there!" I was hired to build a Windows GUI for RTO response: {...} When testing locally in a terminal, this RTO response: {...} Obviously not the end of the world! But RTO response: {...} Sometimes you can't win for losing!

doesn't render with a huge number CAST(CASE WHEN DENY_ADMIN_FILTERS > 0 CAST(CASE WHEN DENY_ADMIN_ACL > 0 CAST(CASE WHEN DENY_ADMIN_RML > 0 CAST(CASE WHEN DENY_ADMIN_WORKFLOW > 0 CAST(CASE WHEN DENY_SET_STATE > 0 CAST(CASE WHEN DENY_SHARE > 0 CAST(CASE WHEN DENY_LINK_PARENTS > 0 CAST(CASE WHEN DENY_UNLINK_PARENTS > 0 CAST(CASE WHEN DENY_LINK_CHILDREN > 0 CAST(CASE WHEN DENY_UNLINK_CHILDREN > 0 CAST(CASE WHEN DENY_WRITE > 0 CAST(CASE WHEN DENY_SEE > 0 CAST(CASE WHEN DENY_READ > 0 CAST(CASE WHEN DENY_READ_END > 0 FROM private_data_iviews.SECURITY_PRECACHE_ACL_INCLUSIVE WHERE @acl_id IS NOT NULL AND @acl_id = ACL_ID AND @user_id = USER_ID

Add a few more parameters, put some arithmetic ;-)

Almost all my code is heavily aligned, and I rely on monospace.

I’m pretty anal about that kind of thing. My cloc score is generally about 50% comment-to-code.

But I’m an outlier. Most folks have almost no comments at all in their code.

I guess I could use tabs, instead of spaces, but I’m not interested in doing that.

I find it interesting how controversial the code comments situation has become.

When I started in this industry, comments were extremely rare and people were consistently pushing to add comments everywhere. Some time later, the pushback came and people started saying that code shouldn't need comments, and if you feel the need to add one... You should rewrite it instead so the code is self explanatory.

Neither side seems to have stopped repeating their points though and there is always a chance to trigger opinionated people into endless discussions just by mentioning comments

I don't bother trying to convince people to see things my way.

All I can say, is that I almost never get questions about my code.

I write about my approach here: https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/leaving-a-legacy/

It's a long screed, so no one reads it.

It was a good screed, not tedious! It made a lot of sense, thank you.

One big thing that has changed in regard to comments is that variables and functions can have longer names now. In most modern languages it is considered bad practice to have single letter variables, or even abbreviated ones, except in very well known cases.

So the rule of thumb for languages like python or ruby is that if you need comments to understand what your code is doing, then you messed up somewhere. Make it easier to read, keep your functions small, and add docstrings. Save your comments for why you're doing something.

But if you're using a less readable language like c, then by all means, comment everything along the way.

I just read a comment I wrote a few years ago that said "I don't know why I have to do it the long way, but it's the only thing that works consistently" over a bit of seemingly verbose code that I would have tried to simplify if I didn't remind myself of that previous struggle.

In the previous century I worked at a company that offered a SQL database, and the mandatory coding standard included:

- Maximum of six characters for any function name. Three characters for the category and three for the actual function. Imagine a code base where every function has a name like strcmp, strlen, etc. So you might have a name like sqlijn for an inner join.

- 80 column line limit, with the first 40 columns reserved for code, and the second 40 columns for a comment. A comment was required on every line of code. So yes indeed, you might see this classic:

         ++i;                             /* increment i */ the database, and I explained that Windows API functions had much longer names and I was going to run out of room to do much in 40 columns. Thankfully, they gave me special dispensation to follow Windows conventions in the Windows code.

My function/method/property/variable names can be quite long.Most of my documentation is headerdoc-style stuff, at the opening of methods, or above properties.
I generally don't have much inside methods, unless I think the code is a bit obtuse, and needs a hand.
Then, it's more important for me to document "why," as opposed to "what."

The trouble with comments is that good taste as well as intelligence is required of the comment author. If you cast your mind over your colleagues you see the problem.

When you hardcode a lookup table to be able to align data is very useful (and also esthetically pleasant), at least from my point of view. I would not leave my monospace font

Printing a table to the console or log file. A very simple example from just this weekend for me is that I wanted to see how C++ was laying out an object in memory. I assigned the pointers to one and two character variables. When I printed out the variable name followed by the address, I actually had to go back and add an extra space before the single character variable names so the addresses would align. That made it much easier to see the differences between the various pointers into the object.

Funny you mention log files with extra spaces. At my current job, I deal with an API called the RTO, and I wanted to log the requests to that API and the matching responses.Of course the words "request" and "response" are not the same length. But I thought it would look nice to line things up for a request and its matching response, so I just added an extra space after "request:", like this:
  RTO request:  {...} looked great. Everything lined up and was pretty.What I didn't realize was that most people view these logs in New Relic, which does use a monospaced font but does not prevent collapsing of adjacent spaces. So the logs look like this:
  RTO request: {...} it did happen that the first part of the {...} stuff should match between the request and the response, so it made it easier to understand (if it worked) to line them up.I am tempted to change the messages to this, which I think will work around this problem:
  RTO request : {...} class="pb-1">> does use a monospaced font but does not prevent collapsing of adjacent spaces.Whoever implemented this in "New Relic" did not think at all about preserving information, which seems critical in a log file.
It may be lost at display time. The default behavior of a browser is to collapse adjacent white space so something like
    <p> of spaces.
You could also align the text with a leading space. But either that workaround or yours only works because the lengths are 1 apart.I wonder why the creators of New Relic decided to let spaces collapse like that. I can't imagine ever wanting that feature in a monospace font.


    SELECT THEN 0 WHEN ALLOW_ADMIN_FILTERS > 0         THEN 1 END AS bit) CAN_ADMIN_FILTERS, THEN 0 WHEN ALLOW_ADMIN_ACL > 0             THEN 1 END AS bit) CAN_ADMIN_ACL, THEN 0 WHEN ALLOW_ADMIN_RML > 0             THEN 1 END AS bit) CAN_ADMIN_RML, THEN 0 WHEN ALLOW_ADMIN_WORKFLOW > 0        THEN 1 END AS bit) CAN_ADMIN_WORKFLOW, THEN 0 WHEN ALLOW_SET_STATE > 0             THEN 1 END AS bit) CAN_SET_STATE, THEN 0 WHEN ALLOW_SHARE > 0                 THEN 1 END AS bit) CAN_SHARE, THEN 0 WHEN ALLOW_LINK_PARENTS > 0          THEN 1 END AS bit) CAN_LINK_PARENTS, THEN 0 WHEN ALLOW_UNLINK_PARENTS > 0        THEN 1 END AS bit) CAN_UNLINK_PARENTS, THEN 0 WHEN ALLOW_LINK_CHILDREN > 0         THEN 1 END AS bit) CAN_LINK_CHILDREN, THEN 0 WHEN ALLOW_UNLINK_CHILDREN > 0       THEN 1 END AS bit) CAN_UNLINK_CHILDREN, THEN 0 WHEN ALLOW_WRITE > 0                 THEN 1 END AS bit) CAN_WRITE, THEN 0 WHEN ALLOW_SEE > 0                   THEN 1 END AS bit) CAN_SEE, THEN 0 WHEN ALLOW_READ > 0                  THEN 1 END AS bit) CAN_READ, THEN 0 WHEN ALLOW_READ_END > 0              THEN 1 END AS bit) CAN_READ_END WITH (NOEXPAND) class="pb-1">This seems like a good example of when not to arbitrarily align characters. Large horizontal gaps can very easily result in moving up or down a line and not realizing it.
How is that? Are you talking about word wrapping?Also, what's the alternative here? Sure, I could indent everything and make it much more vertical, but that would make things even less readable.

Need?  No.  Prefer?  Yes.
  foo(True,  True) in there that isn't clearly an unrolled double for-loop.  Maintaining repetitive code of that form is easier when the arguments are well aligned.  And if you're using an editor with a block-select feature, then this changes from an aesthetic preference into a game-changer when you, say, add or remove an argument to foo.

There is an elegant solution:https://nickgravgaard.com/elastic-tabstops/

While I do very much like that article, and I think it's a viable contender for The One True Way™...They don't solve it.  Those spaces to manually-align things are still potentially skewed because it's not fixed-space.

I don't have anything against proportional fonts for coding in, but the font has to actually be designed for coding, regardless of if it's proportional or monospace. That doesn't just mean having distinguishable 1/l/| and 0/O etc, it also means that the more obscure symbols/punctuation can't just be an afterthought and should compose nicely with regular characters and with each other: (foo) and [foo] and {foo} and <foo> should all look pleasant, things like += and <= and -> should not be misaligned, etc.

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