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Comment by qayxc | Hacker News Reader

This isn't about Ivory tower politics or gate keeping. It's just a fact. Software development changed and Whitney started his career 45 years ago.

If you need help understanding what I mean, look at the credits of computer games released in the 80s and early 90s. You'll usually find a single programmer, with maybe one or two others, who contributed specialised parts like sound/music processing or special effects. No one cared about your particular programming style, because there were no big teams, no code reviews, no PRs. If you had questions, your fellow programmer would simply sit down with you and go over the details until you got familiar with their style and -code.

> failure to adapt to the shop standards usually means your position ends

Well, he runs his own company and has been his own boss for the past 32 years so again - this simply doesn't apply to him.

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It does if any of his customers ever care about maintaining the kind of code after his death.

Code is read more than it is written, and most of us don’t and wouldn’t write in this style. This could mean he’s much smarter than the rest of us, or he could just be a jerk doing his own thing. In either case I’ve never had a good experience working with coders who are this “clever”. Real brilliance is writing code anyone can understand that remains performant and well tested. This is more like the obfuscated Perl contest entries. I guess it’s cool that you can do it, but good sense dictates that you shouldn’t.

As to OPs endeavor to understand this style, it is an interesting learning approach, but I think reading a lot of code in many styles that are actually used by more than one guy is likely to get make you “smarter”.

> It does if any of his customers ever care about maintaining the kind of code after his death.

Which is why there's annotated and reformatted versions of the code. There's basically a "clean" version for those who care about such things and his "development"-version, which looks like executable line noise to the uninitiated.

> This could mean he’s much smarter than the rest of us, or he could just be a jerk doing his own thing.

Or - and I know this is difficult to comprehend these days - he cultivated this style over decades and it's just easier for HIM to work with code like this. No teams, no code reviews, no systems upon systems that need to interact. Just a single page program that does one thing and that he (the only contributor and his own boss) is able to understand and work with because that's what he did for past 50 years.

> In either case I’ve never had a good experience working with coders who are this “clever”.

Neither have I and I wouldn't write code like that either. I also don't think that reading and understanding such code makes you "smarter".

It's more of a peek into a different era of software development and one particular person's preferences.

Still it's amusing how Whitney's style seems to personally offend people. It's just a different way of programming that works for this one guy due to very specific circumstances. Neither the OP nor Whitney himself advocate for emulating this style.

"Still it's amusing how Whitney's style seems to personally offend people"

So it was for the lols after all... Notably, a Lisp interpreter written in Lisp is a common assignment for second year CS students. In a production setting, there is little reason to misappropriate resources for such toys.

Bud Haggert still teaches smart people something very important about communication with interdisciplinary crowds:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ac7G7xOG2Ag

Doug Zongker's presentation similarly instructs people how to make better presentations to peers by demonstrating what not to do:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yL_-1d9OSdk

Best of luck =3

Hard disagree on code being read more often than it is written. I’ve never seen any study of this and in my experience it is not true. Most code reviews end up being perfunctory. Even calling that “reading” is generous.

Anytime you need to change something you have to understand it first. I’ve not seen any evidence that this can be done without reading the code first.

I’ve personally never worked in an environment where code was only thrown out and replaced instead of modified.

Are you counting reading code while you’re developing it? That would sound strange to me. If you’re talking maintenance by someone other than the original developer the pattern I’ve seen is minimal engagement with the code and an almost immediate press to replace it. I’d guess you’re talking about an idealized world.

Conways Law tends to manifest in both directions...

It may be profitable having systems only a few people in the world could understand, but the scope of development is constrained.

I respect your opinion, but also recognize languages like Forth/Fortran actually killed people with 1 character syntax errors. People need to be as unsurprising as possible on large team projects. Sure, all our arrays today could be written in only l's , I's, and 1's like lIl1Il1lI[I1lI11l]... and being a CEO is also still not a valid excuse. =3

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