🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <6923@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>, ed298-ak@violet.berkeley.edu (Edouard Lagache;;;6310183;GY24) writes:
> 
> 	With all due respect to Dr. O'Keefe, does he ever have anything
> 	positive to say?  I must admit that I find his concerns about
> 	code readiability and "standard style" to be rather amusing.  
	         ^
I worry about spelling, too...
When did I ever say "standard style"?
Funny, I thought that in urging people to try to make their programs
readable and save their creativity for solving real problems I *was*
being positive.  I suggested that it would be worthwhile to perform
experiments to resolve some of these questions, and offered to help.
Is that not being positive?  Will nothing less than capitulation to
the Humpty-Dumpty school strike Lagache as positive?

Let me quote Henry Spencer:
	It's quite true that such a set of decisions is, to some degree,
	a matter of personal style.  However, to my dying day I will
	fight the idiot notion that "there is no such thing as bad
	style, only different style".  All of the above examples are
	thoroughly bad style, not just different but inferior:  they are
	dangerous, error-prone, hard-to-follow constructs that should be
	avoided like the plague.  Even when the situation is not this
	extreme, though, there are solid objective arguments for using a
	standard style in anything that somebody else might have to
	maintain one day.  The phrase "anyone should be able to
	understand that" is the mark of the amateur, more concerned
	about his own preferences than his successors' problems.

Note: Spencer says "a standard style".  I don't.  I do think that
anyone who hasn't sought out objective readability principles and
redesigned his coding style around them is being a fool to himself
and a burden to others.

What is "amusing" about my "concerns about code readability"?
Is undreadability a virtue?

> 	As the head TA in a programming course I grade programs in
> 	4 languages, and I assure you that even with fairly strict
> 	style conventions, every new grading task is usually an enjoyable
> 	experience in discovering the depth of human creativity.

I've done this sort of thing too.  But what >size< of program do you
grade, sir?  You can get away with a lot in a one page program.
It's interesting that Lagache says "the DEPTH of human creativity".
One only says "the DEPTH of X" when one dislikes/disapproves of X...
It's also interesting that he says "WITH STRICT STYLE CONVENTIONS".

>								  Inspite
Should this be "In spite"?  There is no word "inspite".	          ^^^^^^^

> 	of this abundance of different coding styles, rarely do I have
> 	to send students back due to "unreadable code".

Eh?  A sentence ago he said that they had "fairly strict style
conventions".  Now he says that there is an "abundance of different
coding styles".  Which should I believe?

I don't know how to evaluate this.  Which are the four languages?
Do any of the compilers pretty-print the listings?  (I've been associated
with ALGOL and COBOL courses where the compilers did that, and what a
boon it was.)  What is the range of stylistic variation?  What size of
programs are these students writing?  Are the programs individual efforts,
or is the "Software Hut" approach being used?  Are code formatters (note
that 'indent' is widely available for C) available to the students?
Do the students who give Lagache such pleasure with the inventiveness of
their layout produce better/worse **algorithms** than those who stick to
the layout they saw in their textbooks?

> 	Come now, should we for the sake of communication standardize
> 	on only one form of greeting, or article format, or even commenting
> 	style?

(1) If I went up to Lagache and said "Teenaa koe!", I don't think he'd
    understand me.  Most people back home would.  If I greeted him
    "Are you at yourself?", I don't think he'd understand me.  Let's
    face it, within any one group, greetings *are* pretty much
    standardised.  There was a time in my life when I tried inventive
    greetings & replies to greetings, and I got some very funny looks.
    That is, "inventive" greetings fail *as greetings*.
(2) In most journals, there IS a single article format, and a great
    help it is.  Come now, would you like every article in TOPLAS to
    be laid out differently?  Would that really help?
(3) I don't recall suggesting that everyone should follow a single
    commenting style.  I did suggest some fairly minimal guide-lines,
    but they leave room for a lot of variation.

Let me offer an example of "creativity".
    In my MSc work, I had the problem that my topic had
    links to three areas of physics, and unfortunately they all used
    different notation for the same things:  there was a quantity
    that some texts called "alpha", some called "-gamma", and others
    called "-(k**2)".  The texts which used "alpha" also had something
    called "k", which was not the same as the "k" in "-(k**2)".  Coping
    with differences that were not different and similarities that were
    not similar was a lot of quite unnecessary pain.

>               In this terribly structured, dry, and mechanistic world,
> 	I vote that we hang on to whatever means of creative expression
> 	remain - even if it is a simple as how we box our comments!
> 
Evidently Lagache and I don't live in the same world.  The world I
live in is full of water, living things, fractals, coincidences, and
surprises.  Laws and patterns *enable* the Great Dance, they are a
trellis for the vine of life, a skeleton for the playing otter.
If I want to be creative, I can write poems, I can play musical
instruments, I can make up stories, I can invent new algorithms and
data structures.  I'm not so short of ways to be creative that I
have to invent new ways of being obscure.  YES, let's be creative.
But let's be creative in ways that aren't a burden to other people!

The layout rules and naming rules I work by are not a cage; they are
*tools* just like the Prolog library (800 predicates and growing).
They are things I don't have to think about any more.  Let's take a
current example:  I have been challenged to produce a Prolog solution
for a certain problem which is "about" as efficient as an existing C
solution.  This particular problem is going to require very careful
thought, and it's also going to require most of my creative powers:
I'm going to have to go back to an abstract description of the
problem and turn it inside out a couple of times.  ANY effort put into
layout and naming is going to distract me, and if I didn't already
have a kit of data structures and naming rules to take as given, I
don't think I'd be able to do it.  Even new style rule I add to my
kit gives me more freedom:  I get to spend more of my time on the
mural and less time erecting the scaffolding.

Without naming names or pointing fingers even indirectly at specific
people, let me say that I have found a strong correlation between
the care that people take to make their programs readable and the
quality of their code in other respects.  (If you think you know who
I have in mind, you're *wrong*.  Yes you are.)

Summary:
	I believe that every aspect of my code should be
	criticised by objective standards, and worry about
	readability.

	Lagache believes that coding style is a matter of
	taste and an appropriate arena for "the depth of
	human creativity", and finds my "concerns about ...
	readability ... amusing."

	Who would you rather buy a program from?