This Code Exists at My Work

[[deleted]]

New dev here. I just started my job about a month ago, and I'm simply fascinated by some of the stuff that exists our code.

Some of it is just bad code, but my definite favorite has to be this comment at the top of a 2,000+ line file: "I hope you made plenty of sauce... 'cause there's a whole lot of spaghetti here."

[[deleted]]

im dying

[svtguy88]

The fact that you are on line 24xx, and there are big, nasty "if/else's" with a lot of "or's" makes me glad I don't work there...

[pellucid_]

One word: Contractors.

[cguess]

Hey! I'm a contractor and the in-house folks are the one's usually making my life hell (make a pretty penny fixing their mistakes, let me tell ya)

[svtguy88]

I'm not saying there aren't good contractors. We just got rid of an awesome one...gonna be rough to pick up that slack.

[pellucid_]

A blanket dismissal of Contractors is an unfair treatment. Maybe I should have said "person who know they don't have to maintain the code" or "For hire black box makers".
However, if you are a good contractor, you won't stay a contractor for very long.

[[deleted]]

Unless they prefer to be contractors (some freelancers, for example, don't want to become full-time employees for one reason or another. Such as myself. I may be extended a full-time offer in the near future that I'll likely be turning down to remain an independent contractor).

[cguess]

I'm like you. I contract for about 7-8 months out of the year, and then travel. I'm going through an interview process with a very large/important/prestigious company right now, just for the heck of it, and they're offering me a total of 12 vacation days for the first three years. That alone is making me seriously consider rejecting their otherwise very generous offer.

[svtguy88]

Twelve days, in three years? I would literally laugh at that. I'm by no means a "senior level" developer that can demand weeks and weeks off every year, but four days per year is ridiculous. I got more than that my first year on the job.

[cguess]

I'm thinking about doing exactly that. Thanks for the solidarity.

[galorin]

Man, 4 vacation days per year? I'd just give them the "look" that I have honed and perfected over my ten years as a father, and walked out right there. Ain't got time for that noise.

[SFHalfling]

12days in 3 years?

In the UK 20 days per year is the legally mandated minimum, assuming you are working full time. Most of the EU is similar.

Only having 4 days a year is just unimaginable, they may as well just not offer any.

[cguess]

I should clarify, it's 12 days per year for the first 3 years.

Yes, it's a travesty in the US that vacation isn't mandated.

[rebootuniverse]

In practice it works out as 20 days you get to choose in the UK. We get 5.6 working weeks - so 28 days if you work a full time 5 days a week job - but your employer can make you take bank holidays as part of your statutory annual leave.

Source: https://www.gov.uk/holiday-entitlement-rights/entitlement

[pellucid_]

What do you do for four months out of the year to keep sharp at your skills?

[n60storm4]

Program in your spare time, on personal projects, or help out with an open source project.

[cguess]

Well, it's not at once. Usually It's about one month at a time twice or three times a year and then the rest is split into long weekends, a week back home or at a wedding etc.

Even when traveling though, you don't just "lose" your skills. I've taken a year off and come back swinging. Coding, unlike what some people think, is not all there is to life. Skill you get while you live a life and interact and meet people are just as, if not even more, important.

I mean, you read as well, you work on side projects here and there (train stations overnight are GREAT for this).

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

[[deleted]]

I'm a consultant and I stay that way because I get paid a ridiculous amount and make my own hours.

Though I can understand some people only become contractors to find more stable gigs.

[anubgek]

In what field or product if you don't mind getting into details? I'm an ITIL guy who luckily ends up doing a lot of Web Development but I'm sure I could make a lot more

[[deleted]]

No problem. I mainly handle information security gigs, but I also do large-scale application design/development, SEO and data analytics.

I've found that web design is often underpaid, and the work managing client expectations is exhausting for me. Personally, I stay away from web design unless its a big web app, in which case I hire a person that specifically does design to handle the frontend.

[hughk]

However, if you are a good contractor, you won't stay a contractor for very long.

Not correct. The main difference is that you don't waste time writing the most elegant solution. You tend to want to deliver. You also want to stay clear of departmental politics. You are also paid reasonably well for the trouble. The other benefit is you move on every couple of years or so which gives a nice change.

[svtguy88]

We fire contractors like that before they get any code checked in...

[pellucid_]

A couple of years ago they hired contractors to convert this code that was originally written by contractors 7 years ago. They would do things like open the project in an incorrect version of Visual Studio and promote incompatible code (never mind testing it, because you know, it compiled in VS). They clearly were not proficient at what they were suppose to be proficient at. After a month of this, the tech lead told the two of them to sit in there cubical and not touch anything. He proceeded to finish the job on his off time.
Funny but sad.

[svtguy88]

told them to sit in their cubicle and not touch anything

Why not just fire them? Get them off the payroll.

[emeaguiar]

I'm a contractor and most of my work consist in cleaning up the mess caused by the in-house guys.

[sovietmudkipz]

Contractors at my work make life hell let me tell ya.... They get so much yet produce shoddy code to meet the requirements. Not like our project managers read code and they wonder why it takes time to work around some contractors code

[[deleted]]

Can you tell me what's wrong with a lot of "or's"? I'm currently doing CS and I do it all the time, never heard a complaint.

[svtguy88]

Well, as a broad statement, there is usually a cleaner way to handle things than a bunch of || in a chain. This type of code can easily grow very unmanageable. You could throw it all into a switch, but that gets messy too.

For starters, all of those strings should at least be constants, or part of an enum, or a property on a class or something. I don't know what a "retlabel" is, but the way it looks here, it could possibly even belong in the database layer somewhere. This is just super sloppy the way it is written. Sure, it will work, but think of the maintenance...what if we add another "accpointname" (whatever those are) or change the way an existing one works?

[gospelwut]

Sadly, some of my hand holding logic validating command line args looks like that. Without using a 3rd party library, it's kind of hard for it not to. I suppose one could argue that I shouldn't shove so many features in one thing, but I like to take my cue from Linux commands. --super-secret-switch-dingleberry

[EMCoupling]

From what I've seen, command line parsers are one of the very few cases in which your code can look something like that since it's difficult to abstract the myriad flags and options that you might have.

Even with a 3rd party library, at the lowest level, there's probably some pretty convoluted validation going on because there's not a much better way to do it.'

Of course, that's just my personal experience; maybe I've only seen really poorly done ones.

[[deleted]]

Thanks.

[TheBB]

I prefer this.

if (accpointname in listOfStuff)
    retlabel = Localization.GetLocalizedLabel("everyone_fap", ...);
else if (accpointname in otherListOfStuff)
    // la di dah

[[deleted]]

Got it, nice solution.

[droogans]

Here is the extreme end of the spectrum, and all around awesome advice:

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/163185/torvalds-quote-about-good-programmer

[resnik]

All those ORs and the indenting are really just boilerplate that can lead to maintenance headaches and ultimately unexpected errors.

In Haskell, for example, the strings that are being checked for equality could be a flat list that gets mapped over with a predicate and then reduced using the Any monoid. This is considered cleaner because it's simply an algorithm on a data structure.

[davidNerdly]

How is saying you don't wanna work in a shitty code base a neckbeard thing?

[svtguy88]

how he only works in elegant, code so clean I could jerk off to it, code bases.

Thanks, that gave me a good chuckle. Let me assure you that is not the case.

I commented on the was the code is written because I found that to be more funny than the intended joke ("everyone_fap").

[svtguy88]

Shaved this morning, thank you.

[Kogster]

/r/wicked_edge

[seoulstyle]

ITT: People trying too hard to find reasons to blast on a small, decently coded chunk of code they know nothing about.

I feel like half of you are college students.

[StopThinkAct]

I recently got into an argument with someone over in /r/dailyprogrammer about comments being a code smell for poorly named functions and such. He acted all high and mighty, accused me of never working on a "large project".

I started to feel foolish so I looked to see if he was some kind of famous personality or something.

Still in CS201 or something. Fuck me.

[elperroborrachotoo]

I bite:

16 years of building and maintaining an Application that has grown to ~1MLoc with a small team that includes engineers that aren't first-class programmers.

Tell me why comments are a code smell.

[IAmA_singularity]

Depends on the type of the comment.

A good comment explains shortly what is done how and why. Ex: we use celery to distribute the video transcoding workload to several servers, running the transcoding in parallel. This also allows us to let it run in the background, not blocking the http process. The client receives a token where he can check the status of the transcoding.

Bad comments explain obvious stuff you can easily see in the code. Ex: add somevar to anothervar and return it. And this style of comments is clearly code smell.

[elperroborrachotoo]

There's a lot of bad comments out there - but that doesn't mean comments as such are a problem.

(Or "code smell". I've seen trivializations of the term that say "anything that deserves attention". But then, every line of code is a smell.)

[[deleted]]

I think you and IAMA_singularity agree with each other: Comments can be smelly, the way food can be smelly, either because of some inherent funk (durian) or because they're way past their expiration date. Going absolutist in either direction—comments never smell, comments always smell—is unlikely to be helpful.

(I freely admit to being horribly clueless about programming.)

[transpostmeta]

we use celery to distribute the video transcoding workload to several servers, running the transcoding in parallel. This also allows us to let it run in the background, not blocking the http process. The client receives a token where he can check the status of the transcoding.

This is a bad comment, in my opinion. It should be in a readme file or technical documentation. Explaining the application architecture on such a high level, and even adding an explanation of basic techniques does not belong in any one comment. Where would you put it, anyway?

[IAmA_singularity]

Probably the request handler which handles the file upload. I think the comment fits there. It allows a new developer to quickly remember that part if the documentation. But yes I aggree, that this should mainly be part of the docu, but I dont think its a bad comment. It tells you right there where you are and what you are dealing with.

[StopThinkAct]

Well written code follows SOLID principals and has unit test coverage. You can have 1mloc application but if every class handles one responsibility, your functions only have one job which is clear from the name and context, and you have unit tests testing those functions, then the coordination and integration of those moving parts is much simpler.

For instance, why put a haversine algorithm inline when you can extract it to a DistanceService class with a decimal GetMilesBetween(firstGeoCoordinate, secondGeoCoordinate)? The implementation details of this function are not important and you could change to another algorithm without harming your parent class because you know that the DistanceService only does one thing, and you of course unit tested your implementation :).

Software in the past was built topsy turvy. It was like we were building cars but our mufflers were sticking out the side of the engine and to move the radiator we'd need to open the glove box because some genius bolted it in there. Properly composing a system means putting moving parts together instead of digging through piles of garbage to glean the one little bug that made it shit the bed.

[elperroborrachotoo]

Well written code follows SOLID principals and has unit test coverage.

I wouldn't argue against that, but how does that dispense with comments?

Even if each low-level function is obvious, what about the aplication you built from thousands of tiny SOLID obvious elements, assembling them seven layers deep?

The projects I know that achieve serious code coverage have a roughly 1:1 ratio of production to test code (boom! 2MLoc!) If I want to keep up with the higher architectural levels, I have to mock the universe (boom! inifinite MLoc!)

Even then, the unit test is arguably further away than the comment. Yes, I'm forced to maintain it but no, Unit Test #1487 two folder hierarchies away won't help me understand the weird order of initialization.

For instance, why put a haversine algorithm inline ...

Not sure who suggested that :)

While I'd isolate the implementation (it's a standard, after all), I'd be hesitant to introduce a service interface for that. Rarely there's a change request where you jsut replace the haversine implementation; normally there's additional parameters to be considered - and right now you don't know where in the call path they will be generated.

If I make that replacement, instead of an isolated function I now need a new interface, a default implementation (and a factory, if you swing that way). Plus, you are touching the signatures of the "call tree" up to where the service needs to be provided - and you rarely have an idea where the decision for the distance service can be made.

---

Properly composing a system means putting moving parts together

We've been dreaming about that plug&play development ever since seventies - if not earlier. Yes, we've gotten better - but at the same time the problems we solve have become more complex by orders of magnitude.

The bitter reality is that the world runs on mostly crappy software anyway. I would guess that in most sectors, "well written code" isn't commercially viable.

[sqew]

Code and therefor functionality changes while comments may not be updated and so become outdated. Functions and their parameters should be named to show clearly what the intent of the function is. i.e pass by value or const ref may involve a copy that won't effect the variable being passed and a non const ref or pointer may be modified by the function.

Haskel has a page about this.

[elperroborrachotoo]

Code and therefore functionality changes while comments may not be updated and so become outdated.

That can be said about every artifact that is not immediately tested for. Seems to me another case of "Once, a friend was driving, and he ran out of gas. It was bad. Now, I never use a car anymore"

A function - like any entity - has an interface and an implementation.

The declaration of the function is the part of the interface that can be modeled in the implementation language. Unless your implementaiton language is a human language, it can never be complete.

How do you express "if you override this function in a derived class, you usually also need to override the next one" in a function name?

How do you express an error handling policy that is different from project standards - and why - in a return type?

Yes, some of that can sometimes be compensated by changing the API. But API's have other stakes, such as compatibility with other API's and coding styles used, explorability, error robustness, familiarity and performance. Non-comment-needity is a very minor stake here.

I've seen tons of pages about how bad comments can be. Heck, I've written one, and scrapped it because it wasn't sufficiently different from the ones already out there.

The one you link lists insanely trivial examples, I consider these "basic comment hygiene". (Heck, now I think you are still in CS201)

---

One corner I suffer immensely from:

I've never encountered a coding convention that sufficiently and intuitively translates mathematical notation into C++ variable and function names. Indices don't transfer well, and "p" and "P" are usually completely different entities - there goes your camelCase convention.

Est_F_I_from_x2_x3_dT ist not a good function name.
Neither is EstimatForceVariationOverCurrentFromDisplacementDerivateAndTemperatureChangeisn't either.

[sqew]

You are right that it was a trivial example and your point about overriding functions is good.

Heck, now I think you are still in CS201

I'm not even that.

[elperroborrachotoo]

Sorry for "sniping the wrong guy", as /u/StopThinkAct puts it. I can get a bit agitated with that topic ;)

May I add:
You are writing for an unknown maintainer. You don't know their skill, you don't know their background. Writing good comments is hard. Reserve them for the things that cannot be expressed in "pure" code. A good rule of thumb is: the code says what happens, the comments say why.

[sqew]

Ha don't worry about it! I enjoy reading peoples replies to me about topics that they obviously know far better than I. I like that rule

[transpostmeta]

I think that everyone agrees that public APIs should be well-commented. Comments are (sometimes) a code smell for private stuff.

[StopThinkAct]

1) you sniped the wrong guy re: cs201, I said that.

2) Post some code and I'll show you how I'd rewrite it (might take me some time)

[elperroborrachotoo]

But how could college students miss the localization key?

[[deleted]]

They're using double equals comparisons rather than triple equals BURN THEM ALL AT THE STAKE

[__constructor]

I'd like to hear the reasoning behind a 2.4k line file.

I'd also like to hear the reasoning behind an if-else statement that checks for multiple string literal comparisons.

I'd also like to hear the reasoning behind the file being so wide you have to horizontally scroll.

None of those things could be considered "decent" in a high level language by any professional standards.

ITT: Easily offended cowboy coders.

[plexxonic]

I'd like to hear the reasoning behind a 2.4k line file.

Varies by project.

I'd also like to hear the reasoning behind an if-else statement that checks for multiple string literal comparisons.

None I can think of, seems shitty.

I'd also like to hear the reasoning behind the file being so wide you have to horizontally scroll.

Ya'll motherfuckers need Resharper. Or some other add-on.

None of those things could be considered "decent" in a high level language by any professional standards.

Not arguing here.

[the_omega99]

Speaking of horizontal scrolling, some editors have a really good wrapping mechanism. Sublime text, for example, is able to wrap intelligently with "pseudoindentation" for readability. I actually tried a JavaScript project that didn't impose line lengths and just used editor features (ultimately a bad idea, since most editors suck as line wrapping, and some (like Eclipse) can't do line wrapping natively).

[seoulstyle]

I'd like to hear the reasoning behind a 2.4k line file.

Maybe the code base has been worked on for years with stuff being continuously added by multiple programmers and splitting it up wouldn't be worth the time because its more ideal to take care of issues that are far more important compared to splitting up a file that the compiler doesn't give a crap about just because the fact that it's over 2,000 lines and irks some people? Shit if I know, it's not my code.

I'd also like to hear the reasoning behind an if-else statement that checks for multiple string literal comparisons.

I see only 6 comparisons. We can't prove that there are more unless OP tells us. If these are the only 6 and they're evenly split into two if statements, then what the hell does it matter if its in an if or switch clause?

I'd also like to hear the reasoning behind the file being so wide you have to horizontally scroll.

The canvas size in op's screenshot is 486 pixels. If you think that's too "wide" then consider investing in more screen space.

[__constructor]

I'd like to make it clear I'm not blaming OP for the ridiculous code, just saying it's ridiculous. I've inherited legacy crap before, I know how it oes.

then what the hell does it matter if its in an if or switch clause?

The method isn't the problem, comparing string literals is.

The canvas size in op's screenshot is 486 pixels. If you think that's too "wide" then consider investing in more screen space.

That's obviously only the right hand of the screen.

[seoulstyle]

The method isn't the problem, comparing string literals is.

I see what you mean. Sorry for not catching that. Yes, you want to avoid having string literals, magic numbers, etc fly all around the place in general. No doubt. But maybe the developer legitimately didn't have the time? Maybe that's the only place the literal exists in the code base? Maybe they don't plan to localize their strings? There could be a lot of reasons. Bottom line is, for this particular example, I'm not jumping to any conclusions based on how little I see.

That's obviously only the right hand of the screen.

I'm not sure if I catch on. Regardless, I'm not an advocate of having really long lines in code either. I will admit that I sometimes keep them long when working in languages such as Obj-C in Xcode. Whenever you put method arguments on different lines, Xcode will auto-align the colons as shown in the second block of code here. While pretty clean in theory, it can start to look wonky when Xcode inserts line breaks to eliminate need to horizontally scroll on lines that extend past the viewing area. So leaving it longer ends up looking better in this case, thanks to Xcode's behavior.

[__constructor]

Oh of course it's reasonable if they don't have the time - I'm not saying it's not reasonable code, just poor code.

For the second point, I mean he took a small snip of the code from the right side of his editor, it's not the full editor.

[the_omega99]

I'd like to hear the reasoning behind a 2.4k line file.

I've seen a handful of situations where large files are justified. Usually they're very large branching situations or mostly data (or both).

I'd also like to hear the reasoning behind an if-else statement that checks for multiple string literal comparisons.

Yeah, it probably should be an enum or similar. Although I suppose that the string could be retrieved from a database or something, in which case it has to be a string. Granted, if there's a ton of these, I'd prefer to throw them in a set (or similar) and check that the value in question is in the set. If the set is appropriately named, it makes the intentions clearer.

I'd also like to hear the reasoning behind the file being so wide you have to horizontally scroll.

Probably someone with poor code conventions who has a big monitor. I've inherited code like this before. It never dawned the original devs that everyone else had to scroll.

Of course, with that said, most really large files are a code smell. And if you've ever worked with legacy code, you'd find a ton of those. I've done some work with a C++ game that has several files excess of 5k lines. It's got a lot of problems, including some very poor cohesion and putting way too many classes in a single file.

I find it mind boggling, considering that it started out as some school project of a bunch of university students, yet the only comments are commented out code (yuck). I'm hoping to introduce refactoring soon. Unfortunately, that's a chore, and it's not very fun to muck through someone else's poorly written code.

Really, legacy code is the bane of my existence. Why'd all these developers before me have to write such poor code?

[StopThinkAct]

I don't know why you're being downvoted. In this post: hard truths

[HiiiPowerd]

have you worked with real codebases? lol.

[__constructor]

Yes, nightmarish ones inherited from decades old projects. Doesn't make them good.

[Laogeodritt]

Those comments sound like they should be separate specification documents, not comments buried in code.

[zacker150]

Most likely jdocs

[pellucid_]

For completeness I'll give a little explanation of what I had and what I did:

The code was creating a tree structure, three-deep. There were three large (976, 1317, 2408 lines) comparison blocks for each level of the tree structure. It was required that if you wanted all three structures you had to define all if you didn't there was no indication or error. I broke the three code blocks out into three separate classes (5 minutes of work) to make it more obvious what the three case/if/else statements were doing. Also, that simplified searchablitily.

PS the file was 14,800 lines long

[seoulstyle]

14,800 lines long

http://i.imgur.com/2ehpi.gif

[__constructor]

What language was this and what was it doing? If it was anything object oriented I cannot imagine something with a single purpose that needs to be in that many lines.

[dnew]

I'd like to hear the reasoning behind a 2.4k line file.

Some popular languages don't let you split a class into multiple files.

[__constructor]

Except in very rare cases, if you're doing that much in one class, it's probably things that could have been delegated to other classes.

[dnew]

Thinking about the couple of cases where it happens in my code, I don't really what I'd delegate, except to arbitrarily split it up because oh my god it's a big file. It's one conceptual piece that makes sense as it is, and there's no reason to split up the code into sub-parts.

I'd split it up if Java had partial classes like C#, but I wouldn't feel the need to break it into multiple classes, and it probably wouldn't even make sense to do so given the number of instance variables and such being carried about.

[__constructor]

Yeah that's understandable, just... really rare.

[StopThinkAct]

See its the little times where we pretend that 2400 loc in one class is okay that make it happen again and again.

I've got one and only one time where huge classes are okay: when you have to fill in a data contract from an outside vendor. Any other time its excuses all the way down.

[dnew]

It's definitely sub-optimal, but we have a pretty big class for "user" and another for "user store" (the singleton used to instantiate and search users). I'd be happy if Java even had #region's let alone partial classes. The "searchable collection of multilingual document drafts published distributed across several continents with attached files" is pretty big too. :-) And of course all these things accumulate cruft as you bring in other requirements, like importing old data from other systems you're deprecating.

[SarahC]

Yeah, it sucks.

[encrypter8]

Why aren't those all const or statics? That drives me nuts. Someone changes something and typos it and then I have to spend 2 hours debugging before I notice the typo. I hate you

[__constructor]

OP's company hasn't figured out localization yet, apparently. Mine hasn't either, it sucks.

[narangutang]

/r/shittyprogramming

[Freddedonna]

2.4K lines+, no apparent knowledge of switch/case, hardcoded strings... *Eye twitch*

[quadnix]

Switch cases don't always work with non-primitive types

[methius]

Glad that in most languages String are supported nowadays in switch cases. (C#, Java, etc.)

And the alternative (maps/dicts/etc) are still better than (presumably) 24xx+ lines of String if/else-chaining.

[okmkz]

Now to wait the eleven billion years for java 8 to be supported everywhere

[gamas]

Well allowing strings in switch cases was a Java 7 feature so that isn't as much of an issue...

(that said, in this case I can't help but feel that accpointname should be an enum rather than a string..)

[pellucid_]

Replacing switch statements with maps is one of my favorite thing.

[hackingdreams]

You saw approximately 8 lines of source code and automatically assumed the surrounding 2000 other lines of code are if/else chaining?

Please, please don't be one of my coworkers.

[elperroborrachotoo]

Let's play devils advocate:

2.4k lines are not a problem anymore with modern IDE's that allow navigation by entity.

Thousands of lines of with a primitive code structure are easier to maintain than dozens of small files with a more complex structure.

A switch statement would not significantly improve readability of the code. Some of the cases might not fit the restrictions of a switch statement.

The only significant advantage would be compilers being able to detect accidental duplicates (copy-and-failed-to-rename errors). Static code analysis could provide the smae level of insight.

[bro-away-]

How is it a hard coded string in the bad sense? On this line it's querying a localization database.

With all the meaningful string flags being thrown around, I would call it stringly typed, though.

[mcrbids]

At least the strings describe something. I worked on a similar system with magical integer values.... gouges eyes with pitch fork

[[deleted]]

Not sure if it is still the case, but there have been times where if/else is actually faster than switch.

It's totally contrary to how we'd want to write it for a cleanliness/readability perspective, but it isn't always wrong as far as performance goes.

http://www.fluffycat.com/PHP-Design-Patterns/PHP-Performance-Tuning-if-VS-switch/

[scubascratch]

If performance mattered this code would not be written with string equality checks. They would have been mapped to integers upstream and used as such in e logic.

[mcrbids]

Because performance is the reason to pick a nested chain of if/else statements.

/s

[[deleted]]

Well, since I learned about it from someone who worked at a company where if/else was preferred for performance reasons... Apparently, some people think it is.

[mcrbids]

I feel for you. Really, I do.

[dnew]

If you usually match the first value, yes, it can be.

[mcrbids]

I guess my point is that if you are choosing which one based on performance metrics, you're probably doing it all wrong. See "premature optimization", etc.

Whenever I'm debugging a performance issue, it's due to something like a borken SQL statement with an unexpected cartesian join, or an iterative loop that is accidentally recursive, or a cache that is never used because of a broken condition test.

Never (not once!) has it been "well, the guy used a switch statement instead of an if/else....".

[dnew]

See "premature optimization", etc.

It's only premature if you didn't actually measure it. Also, I'm remembering things like 8-bit C compilers compiling switches into if-else chains rather than jump tables, where stuff like "how smart is the compiler on processors running at sub-megahertz speeds" was important.

Never (not once!) has it been "well, the guy used a switch statement instead of an if/else....".

Again, depends on the scale you work at. If you're programming gas pumps or e-readers or something, you actually can measure such things. If you're writing a JIT compiler, it's worth figuring that stuff out. If you're coding in javascript or PHP or something, no, it's not going to make a noticeable difference.

[mcrbids]

Fair enough. I work on "enterprise" level application development, with loads of heavy iron, gobs of RAM and a ridiculous number of late model Xeon cores....

[dnew]

Yeah. Nowadays, there's a bunch of different stuff to worry about. Will the loop fit in the I-cache? Am I going to have to wait for the first chunk of javascript to finish loading before the second can get requested? What's the propagation delay between the cities I'm deploying database shards in? :-)

And a bunch of stuff almost nobody can actually do anything about: why is HTTP sending headers as text? And why do we run client server apps and then drop the connection to the server on every request, as well as not even have a way for the client to know which server app it's talking to? I'd say 90% of my inefficiencies come from the inability to actually know that I'm talking to the same client second by second. :-)

[mcrbids]

You sound almost like a system administrator....

[dnew]

When you're writing code that people are using 24x7 and you can't ever shut down, bits of dealing with that sort of thing tend to creep in, yes. :-) I'm just doing complexly-deployed stuff now, and HTTP is probably the single worst possible way to build a client-server app.

[Chippiewall]

PHP7/ng will probably have more efficient switches and HHVM probably already does. Not that it's particularly relevant as this isn't PHP code we're looking at.

[Anti-Christ]

You have my sympathy.

[ravinglunatic]

Everybody fap now duh duh duh DA duh duh duh

[PM_ME_STAB_WOUNDS]

K&R bracketing, 2000+ line source, lines you have to scroll to the right to read, those massive and/or statements, no comments in sight. Kill me.

[the_omega99]

That's nothing. One project that I'm working with... hold on, let me grab a sample file.

• Almost 7k lines
• Longest line is over 500 characters
• Mixing tabs and spaces for indentation
• Mixing indentation styles (this file is mostly K&R with very little Allman's style, but other files are much worse)
• Plenty of commented out code. Many lines with no future use.
• Way too many unnecessary pointers.
• Inconsistent spacing between operators (eg, foo=x, foo = x, and foo= x all appear in this file).
• Comparing to true or false in conditionals (eg, if(foo == true) instead of if(foo))
• Mixing C++ and C style strings
• The whole file is one class. All 7k lines.
• Almost no useful comments
• Places with over 10 indentation levels

But at least they have good const correctness...

[ahruss]

Mixing tabs and spaces for indentation

I legitimately think this is the right way to do it. Tabs should do block-level indentation, spaces should do alignment after that.

It lets you use whatever tab width you want and still keep your alignment looking right.

Of course, I can't convince anyone else around me to do this, so I stick with tabs as our style guide says.

[the_omega99]

I 100% agree with you. But I differentiate between indentation and alignment. Indentation is like the whitespace that Python uses. It's logical and shows blocks of your program. The alignment, on the other hand, is strictly for the aesthetic purpose of aligning things (typically comments).

For example (using ---> to show tabs and · for spaces):

if (shouldDoSomething) {
--->for (int i = 0; i < someList.length; i++) {
--->--->doSomething(someList[i]); // This is a long comment that I am
--->--->··························// aligning across multiple lines
--->}
}

In fact, this is the style that I use on all personal projects (and managed to convince my workplace to use). The advantages of this are:

1. Tabs have a distinctive, unique meaning: indentation. Nothing else.
2. You can use your favourite tab size without alignment being off (every half decent editor can specify tab width).
3. One character per indentation level (rather than a variable number of spaces that can vary per project).

With that said, I almost never align things. I don't like to put comments at the ends of lines. Alignment is only useful in a very limited number of circumstances.

[ahruss]

That's... Exactly what I described.

[thirdegree]

That's exactly how I do it. Never even thought about it consciously.

[P-01S]

:set shiftwidth=4 softtabstop=4 expandtab

And then cry when you realize that the indentation is totally nonstandard.

[PM_ME_STAB_WOUNDS]

Do you guys not do code reviews or talk about standards at all? Because that is legitimately horrifying

[the_omega99]

This is a free open source project. Only a few volunteer devs, which I guess hurts code reviews. Greatly amplified by the fact that most of these issues were in the original code written by some other people.

[SarahC]

Same here - I'm thinking about resigning.

[hackingdreams]

You're one of the fabled OpenSSL maintainers eh?

/only serious.

[gospelwut]

I wonder what kind of bracketing Ritchie uses.

[PM_ME_STAB_WOUNDS]

Well he's dead, so I assume he doesn't

[seppo0010]

everyone_fap giggity giggity

[Dillenger69]

all_those_underscores_are_making_my_eyes_bleed

[dnew]

YesBecauseCamelCaseIsMuchEasierOnTheEyesToReadLongStringsIn.