this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2024
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Science Memes

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[–] [email protected] 224 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (33 children)

As a software developer, the less ambiguous your notation is, the better it is for everyone involved. Not only will I use brackets, I'll split my expression into multiple rows and use tabs to make it as readable as humanly possible. And maybe throw a comment or 2 if there's still some black magic involved

[–] [email protected] 65 points 7 months ago (9 children)

As a professor said, most programming languages don't care about readability and whitespace. But we care because humans need it to parse meaning. Thus, write code for people, not for the machine. Always assume that someone with no knowledge of the context will have to debug it, and be kind to them. Because that someone might be you in six months when you have completely forgotten how the code works.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Yep, if you're writing code for a machine, just do it in binary to save compilation time (/s just in case). Also, you in six months will indeed be someone with no knowledge of the context. And every piece of code you think you write for one-time use is guaranteed to be reused every day for the next 5 years

[–] [email protected] 20 points 7 months ago

And every piece of code you think you write for one-time use is guaranteed to be reused every day for the next 5 years

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