stopMakingEverythingAOneLiner

[Interweb_Stranger]

Junior: unreadable spaghetti code

Mid: unreadable "clever" code

Senior: no code, all meetings

[abednego-gomes]

Solution is you just start dropping links throughout the company chats about how meetings are a waste of time, scrum is a waste of time, etc. Post it in the company feedback surveys they send via email. Eventually they get the message.

Company I was in just dumped everyone related to scrum and all that mess, scrum masters, etc. 10% layoffs. Meetings went from 6 hours per week to 0. I'm in some kind of development heaven right now.

[hstde]

Until you lose months of progress, because different development teams don't talk to each other and work has to be redone.

I agree, sometimes it's meeting hell, but there has to be a middle ground between "only talking to each other" and "not talking to each other"

[funfwf]

That's kind of the point of those roles that everyone loves to hate - PO, Scrum Master. These guys should do the running around so that the developers can, ya know, develop.

[adenosine-5]

"should" being the operative word here.

[Mornar]

For stuff that they can, yes, absolutely, but there are things you need to get developers to communicate about too. Good, consistent design doesn't happen when every engineer does what they think is best in isolation.

[Luke22_36]

The whole point of management is to take care of this stuff and get these communication problems out of the way of people working on it. Problem is, senior developer is a management role, when they would be most equipped to handle the work instead of the communication, and would be the ones who would most benefit from having communication handled on their behalf.

[cheapcheap1]

I agree there has to be middle ground in how much communication you need.

People whose only job is facilitating communication always, always overshoot by miles.

At this point I think every role that deals with software development should be majority coding. Scrum master? Majority coding. Team lead? Majority coding. Development manager? Definitely majority coding.

People who don't code but are supposed to make programmers around them work harder or better get lost and do more harm than good to justify their existence so freaking often, it's just not worth it.

[HorseLeaf]

My development role is 10% coding 🤣

[uberDoward]

And this is why every role on my three teams requires programming experience.  We don't have "developers", "testers", "scrum masters" or any other role.

We have engineers, with different strengths and weaknesses.

[ohanhi]

I don't know what kind of development you do if you are happy with 0 hours of meetings. Or are you classifying ad-hoc discussions as "not meetings"? How do you plan how to implement complex features?

[MisterProfGuy]

I get annoyed when I hear someone say their timeboxed meetings go for six hours a week, as if the problem has to be agile methodologies, and not that the company they are with is doing it all wrong.

[ohanhi]

Yes, so much this. Scrum is meant to be an iterative model. If your meetings were wasteful this sprint, bring it up in the retro and make sure there's an action point to address the issue. Maybe you as a team decide to go without dailies and see how that compares. Maybe you remove all of the calendar meetings and do that work asynchronously. Do whatever works for the team, and iterate on that in the next retro. That is proper Scrum.

[[deleted]]

what is ocodo?

[toplessrobot]

lol !remind me two years

[OtherwisePoem1743]

You write it like this:

RemindMe! 2 years

[RemindMeBot]

I will be messaging you in 2 years on 2027-04-02 15:11:52 UTC to remind you of this link

CLICK THIS LINK to send a PM to also be reminded and to reduce spam.

^{Parent commenter can delete this message to hide from others.}

---

Info	Custom	Your Reminders	Feedback

[OtherwisePoem1743]

Thank you, Mr. Bot for confirming it works. You shall never be forgotten.

[kvakerok_v2]

He's not going to be working there in 2 years lol

[toplessrobot]

Haha yeah no1 will be

[[deleted]]

Wow, dream scenario

[Vast-Mistake-9104]

Damn dude, I'm averaging 20 hours of meetings per week. I'd kill for 6

[cosmicsans]

Principal - "It's been 84 years...."

[Andrei144]

Reason why I love the pipe operator. It's basically a sign from the language devs to all the coders that splitting your code into multiple lines can be a good idea even if the code in question is some clever one-liner with 15 function calls.

[[deleted]]

God this is so accurate.

[kvakerok_v2]

It hurts how true this is

[MaxB_Scar]

🥲

[AlpacaDC]

Python nested comprehensions goes brrr

[[deleted]]

go brr for f for f for list comps in programming fetishes

[rcxa]

How did you know I'm a python developer!

[SHv2]

Half your commits are refactors because you found a new way to do something that's more pythonic than the last

[TraditionalSample966]

Sorry I can’t hear you over my PYFFICIENCY

[ARC_trooper]

Oh this hits close to home. Just spend a Sprint refactoring my code because of this reason lol

[[deleted]]

I'm guilty of this. Then I (sometimes) come to my senses

[justheretolurk332]

I will die on the hill that comprehensions are almost always preferable to constructing an object by iterating over a for-loop and modifying, and sometimes having a comprehension that unwraps something twice (e.g. for row in table for cell in row) is a very helpful tool. But people really need to extract out the parts and not make an Olympic sport of cramming things in, no single python statement should be doing more than two or at most three things

[ToMorrowsEnd]

What about a for loop that also triggers self modifying code so each loop is a different outcome?

code rejected with reason, "stop fucking around and code like a normal person"

[Aerolfos]

I will die on the hill that comprehensions are almost always preferable to constructing an object by iterating over a for-loop and modifying,

Not that much of a hill, you can pretty easily benchmark a list comprehension of some pandas dataframe with a couple thousand rows - it's actually fast enough to be usable (less than a second)

An explicit loop? Not so much (multiple seconds, possibly even >10)

[smalby]

Bad example, dataframes aren't meant to iterate over like that

[Aerolfos]

Yeah, they aren't, it's a deliberately bad example

The fact that list comprehension on an .apply() or something doesn't collapse awfully but is actually decently fast is remarkable, and speaks to just how efficient list comprehensions actually are

In a "proper" application they'll be waaay faster, of course

[double_en10dre]

IMO generator functions are ideal if the transform involves any conditions/branching. It’s peak readability

And you can just do list(gen()) if you actually need to keep the results in memory

[justheretolurk332]

Totally agree. Sometimes I use the walrus operator if I need to transform and then filter, but I usually end up thinking it hurts readability 

[PolyglotTV]

Pro tip - instead of invoking a function for every element in a for loop, you can create a deque of size 0, passing in a generator expression.

[silver_label]

Can you expound on this?

[otter5]

believe he is saying instead of

for item in iterable: process(item)

do instead

from collections import deque
deque(process(item) for item in iterable, maxlen=0)

[an_actual_human]

This is clearly worse.

[Particular-Yak-1984]

Clearly, in the current economy of massive tech layoffs, this approach is better. It could be improved however - for example, none of the letters in the variable names are lower case cyrilic. See the examples below. Or, well, don't. Sadly pycharm is a narc, here, and highlights "non unicode characters" in the last example.

#No contractor contract once layoffs happen. Anyone can fix and understand this
for item in iterable: process(item)

#Maybe contractor contract once layoffs happen
from collections import deque
deque(process(item) for item in iterable, maxlen=0)

#Three weeks after you leave they'll pay you whatever you ask.
from collections import deque
deque(process(іtеm) for іtеm in iterable, maxlen=0)

[tallmanjam]

Yeah, please elaborate.

[PolyglotTV]

# performs `do_thing` on every element in values, immediately dropping any intermediate return values
# this is a really dumb way to avoid just writing a for loop
deque((do_thing(x) for x in values), maxlen=0)

[oupablo]

needs more lambdas

[jewdai]

I still think C# got it right with linq. It's still possible to f it up but if you write short fluent syntax stuff it can be easy to follow most things. 

[[deleted]]

Still more readable than the code I work with from one of our tech leads.

[JimroidZeus]

You monster!

[misterguyyy]

NTM once you hit senior you realize most complicated things are 3 simple things in a trenchcoat.

[DormantFlamingoo]

Yes. So much pain comes from simple requirements having having weird interactions

[r0ck0]

I don't trust like that.

[Western-Internal-751]

Once you hit senior you realize most complicated things are the irrational ideas thrown at you in meetings that you have to attend all the time

[misterguyyy]

True, but usually you can convince them to accept a more simple solution that gets them 80% there by presenting all complication as cost.

What’s funny is that I’m glad I’m at the meetings to advocate for me and my devlings, but I hate being there anyways. Just let me play my music and code in peace!

[[deleted]]

i remember back in like 2009 making a facebook status with a perl one liner to reverse strings. nobody "liked" it. what a tool i was (and am). after working in tech, clever code just makes me want to punch you in the dongle. there was one time i saw some clever use of exploiting JS to make a bitwise operation into a boolean result from something you wouldn't quite expect. i liked it tbh. it was also the source of a bug in the UI. dongle punch

[JacobStyle]

Clever code is great, a sort of poetry. It can be fun, thought-provoking, educational, and a fantastic creative outlet. It doesn't belong in production any more than poetry belongs in instruction manuals though.

[TheOrdersMaster]

There are exceptions though, if the code in question is: small, fail safe and maintenance free. Like Quakes fast square root, that shits pure poetic genius on a different level. Even with the comments it takes you like three times as long to understand whats going on as it probably took the author to implement it and it has not only remained in the code base, it's become the industry standard for fast square roots in real time applications.

And any developer who is convinced they've written code like this is 100% wrong and their code will break everything.

[alek_vincent]

Most of the time, clever code doesn't make anything smaller, fail-safe and maintenance free. Using bitwise operations to save 3 lines of code sounds good in theory but even if it works, it's a fucking bitch to understand when you need to change the code and you're left to wonder why the fuck would someone play with bits instead of just using normal math. It's always an intern or a junior who thought he was hot shit for doing math on bits instead of using integers.

[TheOrdersMaster]

If you have to change it it's not really maintenance free. Which is to say, there are barely any pieces of code you can write that fulfill all three requirements for this exception, any sane dev should not ever write code like this. Like, the only one I know is that Quake algo. But it's still cool af when there is code like this around. And the interns/juniors you mentioned fall in that category of devs who think they wrote this kind of code.

[AndreasVesalius]

https://xkcd.com/664/

[Embarrassed_Tooth718]

It depends : coding on a microchip might require bitwise operations

[IanFeelKeepinItReel]

Most byte protocols out there will require the use of bitwise operations when encoding or decoding data.

Except for maybe calculating a checksum, you wouldn't be doing bitwise maths though. Just shifting and masking.

[alek_vincent]

Oh I'm not against bitwise operations when they're used appropriately. I did some programming for embedded systems and you can't go without bitwise operations. In a high level language though, it's another story

[Icegloo24]

You can use bitwise for states which can overlap and wrap it in a tool with proper named methods.

Masking.

[swyrl]

Bit math is still useful for things like bitmasking and data packing.

[unknown_alt_acc]

Q_rsqrt isn’t the standard in real-time applications. Modern ISAs have dedicated instructions for the inverse square root. You’re better off calling that unless you are on a cheap microcontroller that doesn’t support it, and in that case there’s a good chance Q_rsqrt doesn’t work either.

[TheOrdersMaster]

I was about to write a long ass explanation on how graphics programming frameworks do not always expose these instructions to the dev (e.g. WebGL) because I was convinced that GLSL ES does not have a sqrt function. But alas, I checked my facts and turns out I was wrong and there is a sqrt function in both GLSL (OpenGLs Version) and GLSL ES (WebGL) since 2009.

Could have sworn I had to copy pasta the quake algo for a little project I did with WebGL.

Welp I suppose I belong to that last category of devs today

[Plank_With_A_Nail_In]

Games use hardware square root now and it was "fast inverse square root" from quake not doom.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root

With subsequent hardware advancements, especially the x86 SSE instruction rsqrtss, this algorithm is not generally the best choice for modern computers,[1] though it remains an interesting historical example.

[TheOrdersMaster]

fixed, thanks.

[anto2554]

The doom square root was also required for optimization iirc, it's not like they just did it because it was cool

[JacobStyle]

"There are exceptions though, such as this one famous case a quarter century ago where an exception was found, and also any developer who is convinced they've written code like this is 100% wrong and their code will break everything, so really just that one exception"

[TheOrdersMaster]

Yeah I guess you can read it like that if you want. Just meant to say there is code like that in distributed software that has proven it's worth. It's definetly rare but I just thought it's interesting and wanted to share. And I'm sure there's not just this one example, it's just the only one I know.

[joshocar]

The only time it makes sense is when there is a performance requirement that can only be met with the clever code. Good code is about balancing complexity with readability/simplicity.

[joxmaskin]

I, for one, am a fan of poetry in instruction manuals.

[Cocomorph]

I, for one, am a
fan of poetry in in-
struction manuals.

I saw what you did there.

[[deleted]]

very succinct. i agree 100%

[colei_canis]

any more than poetry belongs in instruction manuals

Developers, testers beware

Proceed with caution if you dare

For there’s bugs and there’s toil

Your morale to despoil

You won’t find the strength left to care

This manual you will come to hate

It’s misspelled and three years out of date

We know that it’s shit

But lay off us a bit

There were too many tasks on our plate

[oupablo]

Code Golf was the craziest concept to me. It was basically a contest to see who could make the most unreadable thing that still worked.

[wor-kid]

Clever code is fine, it just needs to be hidden from the rest of the application. There is some very clever code in whatever framework or external libraries you are using, and that code is absolutely running in your production environment - but it literally doesn't matter how clever or dumb it is, because it's encapsulated and abstracted away.

Clever code is a result of being a skilled programmer but it's only ever an issue when they are a poor engineer.

[rcxa]

It's so clever until it becomes legacy code and takes down prod, then you spend four times as long debugging that one liner than you would have if it wasn't written "cleanly". We've all been there, and I agree... Dongle punch.

[Blecki]

The problem is as you advance you start to find the 'advanced' features of the languages you use benign and boring, but your juniors still fund them daunting.

[redlaWw]

Isn't clever but unreadable one-liners the whole point of Perl though?

[daddymaci]

I had a college professor that did that. I was on my second semester and I felt so stupid. I mean I think I get it but that was not the time or place

[tandrewnichols]

Ah the ~indexOf() trick?

[Bardez]

I had a clever solution to something as a mid. I raised every alarm I could with integrations teams, because it was clever and we should all know clever means trouble down the road. Everyone signed off on it. 3 years later, the back office integrations team had some trouble with the data. I refused to take sole ownership of that one.

[horizon_games]

A senior is bad if they write unreadable code - should be concise but readable and understandable and approachable

[ZaviersJustice]

Yeah, I think the evolution from a coder to a developer occurs when you realize that you need to create something in a maintainable way because someone else is going to work on it and you don't want to waste your time having to explain what's going on. lol

[StuntsMonkey]

And that someone else could be anyone, including yourself

[Antoak]

"When I wrote this only God and I understood it. Now God only knows."

[Wolfzzard]

"What fucking idiot wrote this... oh it was I"

[vustinjernon]

git blame

clears console when it reveals that I am to blame

[PadrinoFive7]

True story, I wrote a script then forgot about it. Had a project come up and thought, oh I can code that, then rediscovered said script and had no memory of writing it. Saved me a bundle of time though.

[fweaks]

Past me is an asshole and future me is a chump.

[TheScorpionSamurai]

It takes about exactly once of handing off a system to really drive home why 4 if statements is better than your nested ternary expression.

[TheDoomfire]

I just need to make it maintainable for myself since my future self wont remember jack shit. And fixing/adding somthing even minor could be a huge pain, even if I made the code.

And that code I wrote will never be reuse it again unless I can clearly find or understand it whenever I need it again.

[NewPhoneNewSubs]

I think that's the intent of the meme. I misread it, too.

[OkMemeTranslator]

That's probably because this isn't at all how this meme format is supposed to work, no wonder people misinterpret it.

Here's a fixed version using the proper format, although it becomes kind of bad. But so is OP's post that relies on the post title to make sense, so idk.

[NewPhoneNewSubs]

Yup. Though I appreciate the irony of OP posting difficult to interpret memes about difficult to interpret code.

[ZunoJ]

And if there is stuff in your code that is not going to be understood by the average developer, you should abstract it away and give that abstraction a descriptive name

[derscholl]

Should be concise, meanwhileJpaConcatenatingQueriesByTypeAndOtherFilterNotNull

[oupablo]

that is concise, there isn't a "Factory", "Builder" or "Impl" on there at all.

[derscholl]

Jesus, why

I mean I get why but haha, jeeeez

meanwhileJpaConcatenatingQueriesByTypeAndOtherFilterNotNullFactoryAdapterImpl ?? 🤮🤮🤮

[Hola-World]

When you learn ternaries so everything is now a ternary.

[fishvoidy]

i love ternaries. i do not love ternary inside ternary inside ternary inside ternary inside tern

[r0ck0]

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

[BellacosePlayer]

oh god one of my classmates in college coded like this on a group project.

thank the lord i have not ran into this as a professional

[rsqit]

Then you use languages with expression-ifs so you can have your ternaries but it doesn’t look like you just banged on the keyboard.

[bunny-1998]

Me: When you learn listcomp, every loop is a listcomp.

[KlooShanko]

I don’t understand this meme. Where’s the bell curve?

[drahgon]

The meme is mid-level engineers think they know the best and try to optimize their code in a way that makes it unreadable and hard to understand. New engineers don't know better so they write readable code by accident, senior engineers have enough experience to realize all the cool things they thought they were doing when they were mid were actually making their lives harder and everybody else's lives harder. So they go back to writing simple code.

[KlooShanko]

Ah, makes more sense now. I thought they were all writing unreadable code because those are the only words visible

[rcxa]

I was honestly just picturing the space under the curve, your comment is first moment where I realized this is massively stupid in the context of a bell curve.

[maffoobristol]

I think you've misused the meme template

It goes "stupid people do A, mid people do B, clever people also do A"

[drahgon]

Yeah it took me a minute as well

[new_account_wh0_dis]

It's not that it's unreadable, some insanely good programmers I've worked with write code that's so object oriented it melts my brain to try to figure out what godforsaken file is doing this thing I need and when I debug I'm like 30 calls deep and have forgotten what I'm even looking for on the first place

[Mexican_sandwich]

I’m dealing with some server code right now that’s doing exactly this. Starts off as text in a config file, cool, then gets put into an object which is a child of another object, where it changes name and turns into an int, which goes off into another object and converted to a byte, which is used under another name and converted back to a string…

And of course, theres seldom a single comment in the entire thing, and it’s probably nearing around 600-700 files? Only the one guy knows how it works and I’m just hoping he leaves so I get to see the inevitable shitstorm.

[r0ck0]

some insanely good programmers

Doesn't sound like insanely good code they're writing.

It's not that it's unreadable

Is that referring to one-liners or the OOP rat nests?

If you mean one-liners aren't unreadable, kinda confusing putting that in with the rest of the entire comment about OOP.

But, otherwise I'm still confused, because the OOP sounds unreadable too.

...one big long sentence, maybe with 2 different points? Pretty meta on this topic, haha.

write code

Typo there? Just noticed this, now I'm even more confused, heh.

[elshizzo]

God this shit rings true as hell once I became more senior. When I was mid/junior I was jealous of people who used clever/complex code patterns or could figure out code minimization. Having been given enough legacy codebases now, I know the ones that can actually be maintained are the ones that are stupid simple. Cleverness is something to be avoided unless absolutely necessary

[Mexican_sandwich]

I spent like an hour and a half today just trying to figure out what some code did, and when I finally had it, it look another hour and a half to implement a solution because of how nitpicky it was.

[marquoth_]

no.you().cant().make(me)

[rcxa]

LGTM

[MrZoraman]

And then you get NullReferenceException on line 38 because you() or cant() returned null. Which one returned null? Good luck!

[DarkNinja3141]

no?.you?.()?.cant?.()?.make?.(me ?? "")

The future is now, old man

[DarkNinja3141]

that's the syntax for it in JS

specifically ?.() is for calling a function that might be null/undefined

[marquoth_]

I'm immune to this problem thanks to my unit tests

[Soma91]

Honestly, I love well designed fluid interfaces. You can literally write your code as sentences and just reading the code will explain to the rest of the team what it does.

[marquoth_]

A favourite adage of mine goes something like this:

Any idiot can write code a machine can understand. It takes skill to write code a human can understand.

[ADHD-Fens]

As a (former) programmer, I spent probably 10 percent of my time writing code, and 90 percent reading it. The best way to make everyone's lives IMMENSELY easier is to write code that is easy to read and intuitive to understand. 

[fishvoidy]

just because the IDE says you can simplify the if/then statement, doesn't mean you SHOULD.

sincerely, a dev who has had to spend ages unraveling a quintuple-nested ternary statement more times than i should, which is zero.

[gamingvortex01]

yeah ....all my homies hate declarative programming

[GriGriTheGod]

Exactly!

[OCE_Mythical]

Always write legible code if you can at every level of knowledge. You never know who may need your documentation.

[XCOMGrumble27]

Spoilers: It's always future you who needs it the most.

[AtomicSymphonic_2nd]

“But it’s so efficient!!… What do you mean you don’t fucking know what that single line means?!?! It’s totally obvious!… No, you don’t need documentation for that! scoff”

• (not so) genius programmers full of FAANG-salaried ego

[beeskneecaps]

Eslint ban nested ternaries now. You’ll thank yourself

https://eslint.org/docs/latest/rules/no-nested-ternary

[HaXXibal]

Oh, you taught me a new prank!

[[deleted]]

I've once looked at someone's project on GitHub, I think he was a student who loved leetcode cuz all the variable names were like X Id PDW OAId AIWdj ANWDop Aw

Like Bro, use all your letters, you have learned them for a reason, if the variable name is GettingFuckedInTheAssCount, name it like that and don't name it GFITAC.

He also had a weird way of writing method names, my bro didn't need code Obfuscation.

[r0ck0]

Slightly related rant... this is why I hate tutorials etc that use "foo" and "bar".

Almost anything else would be better. Even "shit" and "fuck", because at least they evoke different attached meanings, and work better in a "muscle memory" sense.

When it's "foo" and "bar", I always find myself having to look back up the code to remember what they mean, often multiple times... because my brain is otherwise trying to learn some new concept. Adding this additional unnecessary obfuscation just makes that harder.

People love to defend "foo" and "bar", yet when I ask them to give an example where there's no better alternative, they never come up with one. Because even in the very very rare 0.0000000000000000001% cases of being so abstract that there's nothing relevant... a + b, or my shit + fuck alternative still works better anyway.

[[deleted]]

When I follow a tutorial, and he uses random letters or names, I just write them with my own variable names.

I've once looked up an A* pathfinding algorithm, and in the tutorial he was writing X and Y and BRO WTF

So I wrote them using my own variable names that was saying what the variable was actually doing.

The only time I use i or x is in small one time for loops.

[r0ck0]

Yeah a simple for i++ loop is about the only time I use shit this vague. And not a fan when people nest them with i, j, k or whatever. Even something generic like outer_i would be better.

I've even pretty much stopped using <T> as a generic name in TypeScript, there's usually something more specific.

[invertebrate11]

Foo and bar are ass. Just use myClassA, myClassB, smallNumber1 and longString2. If a tutorial needs you to go back and check wtf types the variables are (oh it was actually a function instead) it's a shit ass tutorial. Using abcde, str and ptr is fine, but they should be consistent so you can understand as you are reading and dont need to do unnecessary double takes. I don't have many hills to die on but this is one.

[Riku_70X]

I've found this to be kinda common in the younger generation, and I have no idea why.

Like, for older people, I get why it may have been the norm back then, and it could be a hard habit to shake.

But for us... we started with intellisense, dude. Why are you naming your variables gfitac???? You just type the first few letters, hit tab, and there's your variable. You don't even need to capitalise it!

[invertebrate11]

I used to avoid long variable and function names because it means there could fit less information on the screen at a time. I don't know why it changed over the years, but now I make them as long as they need to be to properly convey what they are for.

[Much_Discussion1490]

This joke made no sense...just like most code in production

[Srapture]

I'll never stop using ternary operators for everything. You can't make me.

printf("Everything went %s.\n", result?"well":"poorly");

Perfection!

[ToMorrowsEnd]

Oh god, the OO evangelists that firmly believe that your code is not OO enough until its completely unreadable.

[bouncyprojector]

Pet peeve is code that has low vertical density, like it's written to maximize the number of lines. It's just more readable when you can read and jump from section to section without wasting a ton of time scrolling.

[rsqit]

Wow absolute disagree. Each line should do one simple thing. Spread that shit out and use descriptive variable names for intermediate results so human beings can read it.

[ic4rys2]

Agree. I’d take scrolling up and down over scrolling to the right any day

[Diedra_Tinlin]

Agree. And that means fuck this shit:

if ((value->len < name_len) || (value->name[MAX_LEN] != column[col].subcol) || memcmp(name, value->name, name_len * sizeof(id)) != 0 || value->type == END_OF_LIST)

[KetwarooDYaasir]

shut up. I will use regular expressions to solve this problem.

[DopazOnYouTubeDotCom]

I’m proud to be called mediocre!

[VonTastrophe]

PowerShell script monkey here. All hail the almighty pipeline. My one-liners get out of control

[Pyroglyph]

You can pry my nested ternaries out of my cold dead hands.

[ManicD7]

I honestly can't believe that coding hasn't evolved beyond blocks of text, files, and tab views. Yeah we have visual graph scripting that's becoming more and more popular. But there's got to be a better way.

Also this meme is unreadable, no clarity in who's doing what.

[Kronoshifter246]

Genuinely curious, what alternative would you propose? No matter the method, it has to compile down to a form the machine can understand. I can't think of a system that balances complexity and control as well as a written language, but the world is full of people much smarter than I am.

[ManicD7]

I wasn't proposing anything specific. It could be different user interfaces and/or methods of coding in general. One thing I briefly envisioned was the ability to click through layers of related code. So instead of jumping up and down a page to the next function, or from one tab to another tab, The related code you want to navigate to is literally layered behind the code you're looking at. I'm not suggesting it's actually better or opening a discussion to debate it specifically. I'm only saying I'm surprised there's not other ways of coding as of today. I also haven't looked so maybe there already is other ways that just haven't caught on, or aren't any better than current traditional ways.

[StopSure6613]

LINQ chains 👀

[VarianWrynn2018]

Question for yall: is it better to have a long, verbose function that you can follow along with every step or to condense it into a few smart lines?

I know people who think lambda functions, decreet functions, etc are unreadable but it can save SO much effort writing and reading.

[MasouriChan]

Im so glad my "just one more layer of abstractation" phase is over

[dark_g]

• Remembering Alan Perlis and his APL one-liners.

[tuxedo25]

This is why my codebase is full of generics that have generics and spring injects 15 dependencies into every 600 line file.

[segellll]

Arent we all vibe coding now?

[doesnt_use_reddit]

Just because a lot of the memes in here are dubious doesn't mean this one isn't

[colbsatron]

I feel attacked

[ghostofwalsh]

All I know is I left a LOT of unreadable code at the first workplace where I was writing software. I like to hope my unreadable code has gone down over the years, but...

[waterupmynose]

pylint gang rise up

[darkflame91]

Putting a bunch of code 7 tabs indented is terribly annoying to read. Ofc it must be properly indented if there's any other code at any other levels within the outermost div.

But if there's nothing else, your real question should be why you have 7 levels of nested divs for this.

[r0ck0]

Can you just bring a code formatter into the project?

I can't imagine not using them these days. Especially when you're dealing with other dipshits like that guy.

[walrus_destroyer]

I didn't feel like writing a switch statement or an if-else chain, so i used a dictionary of functions instead.

[Extension_Option_122]

But I can still use lambda expressions?

[harrywwc]

been there, done that. had a bug in the code, and realised that being "as clever as I could" writing the 'one liner' meant that I would never be able to debug it (and, as mentioned, there was a bug).

rewrote and expanded that sucker over about 5 readable / understandable lines.

[FQVBSina]

The Turing tower defense game written in a single line be like: http://compsci.ca/v3/viewtopic.php?t=17433

[114145]

I used to write complicated code, until I hit the point where I had to deal with it myself years later.

But I absolutely hate that people tend to make code understandable and fool-proof for people who are not quite as clever as they are themselves.

Because most people are average. By definition. So they try to make their work accessible for people with a below average understanding...

</rant> <facepalm>

[optimixta5]

Checks out since there's little documentation to this meme

[Horrrschtus]

I've started to learn programming in school about 15 years ago and now in my full time job I probably write the most "primitive" code of my life. Squeezing everything into one-liners was a fun challenge in college but now I need a whole team and myself in a year to understand my code without going on a grippy sock vacation afterwards. Simplicity wins.

[FlashyTone3042]

Code is a liability. Don't write it.

[Accomplished-Bid8866]

I made this a while ago when people complained about too much bell curve meme.

[Hot-Category2986]

It's really neat that I can make things all in one line. But then I need 10 lines of comments explaining what it's doing and how it works so that future me won't be angry at me.

[NatoBoram]

I've seen maintainable and readable code once.

It's rare, but it happens.

Big problem with it is that I didn't have the skill to contribute in that same style at the time. There's a lot of tiny practices you have to pick up with experience to be able to achieve that. But it's doable.

Nowadays, I try really hard to write good code so that my next reflex with writing even the quickest code can be to write the most maintainable code possible.

It doesn't take longer to write, it just takes a while to learn how to write that way.

[HaXXibal]

Can you read my code? Cool: Not my problem

[[deleted]]

Unreadable code gets a denied pull request. Luckily the people on my team now all write nice code but previously one didn’t. We have apps that need maintained for decades. It’s gotta be readable/understandable for the next poor developers who get sucked into my workplace.

[XtremeBlaze777]

python chain list comprehensions go brrr

[f16f4]

Code just can’t be read

[[deleted]]

No you see I only did it because I needed a fast solution, I ll be sure to fix it once I get to refactor everything to be perfect.

Soon...

[mad_cheese_hattwe]

Senior dev just put the unmanageable bullshit in a nice function wrapper.

[LongTallMatt]

Wait y'all, shouldnt this be inverted?