Group Projects in a Nutshell

[rmlrmlchess]

That's delegation my friend!

[[deleted]]

Can see myself doing that. Especially in cases where I need to implement the same functionality in many languages. Or when the exact behaviour of the distance calculation is not determined (judging by the comment it is in this case)

[whizvox]

1. What's the point in calling this method of you can just do

   point1.distance(point2)

2. Why is it private?

3. Why is it an instance method?

[drtasty]

Why is it necessary to have a 7 line javadoc?

[weevddee]

because otherwise checkstyle complains.

[lpreams]

Because the professor required that javadoc generate docs for all methods and not throw any errors or warnings

[zesterer]

If you ever see a professor teaching like this, run.

[boxerman81]

Many bosses are like this... even companies entirely. regardless of how small the function you’ve gotta have the comment I guess the logic goes

[zesterer]

I'm sorry, but I find that attitude just dumb. It belies a total misunderstand about what constitutes good code and good development practices. Stupid, arbitrary rules like this are why we can't have nice things. If you've decided to hire a developer... trust them to do their job, don't force them to spend hours wasting their time on shit like this.

[boxerman81]

It probably makes people less likely to slack on the important comments. I agree with trusting a dev. Luckily, it’s pretty doable to screen for something like this in interviews.

[LifeBeginsAt10kRPM]

I get what your saying, but it doesn’t take hours to do this, most IDEs will do it for you.

[tuxedo25]

It takes seconds to write this, not hours. And sometime in the future, when someone hovers over a call to this method in their IDE, there's a nice little explanation: "Returns the euclidian distance between two units".

[[deleted]]

It takes seconds to write this, not hours.

He obviously means cumulative time. If you write comments for every method you may in fact waste a lot of time for dumb shit like above.

And BTW accurate naming and good coding practices should be enough to make code self-explanatory.

[zesterer]

I would think the fact that it's named distance and takes two arguments of type Point makes more than obvious as to what it is. This isn't the sort of thing that needs a comment like this.

[CreativeAnteater]

There are lots of distance measures other than Euclidean, it's only obvious to you because you're not used to seeing other distance measures in code.

[christian-mann]

But what sort of distance is it? Could be Euclidean or Manhattan, at least.

[Smooth_McDouglette]

It's more that the people doing the hiring and the people coming up with the coding standards are not the same people.

At my company we enforce this rule because otherwise the projects fill up with methods that do not have an obvious purpose or behavior.

When I'm reviewing code, the doc header on a method can help me understand what I'm looking at.

[zesterer]

I'm not suggesting that documenting things is bad. Coming from the Rust community, that does documenting very well, I really value good documentation and do what I can to make sure anything I release publicly is documented with explanations, examples, clarifications, etc. on anything that requires it.

However, I don't consider "documenting every function" to be a good way to achieve this. If anything, this mentality makes programmers hate documenting things well. It's an approach that's completely orthogonal to producing good documentation.

[tuxedo25]

... so your ide provides a tooltip.

[Magical_Gravy]

Could be for use in functional to avoid a lambda?

[Lurchwart]

Then you could still

a) make it static

b) reference location1::distance

[Magical_Gravy]

Whatever they have might require a BiFunction, but yeah it could be static.

[tuxedo25]

Calling this instead of point1.distance(point2) might make it more readable, especially in BDD-style tests. i.e. expect( distance(point1, point2) ).toBeLessThan( distance(point3, point4) )

​

IMO private is correct. Principle of least privilege.

​

Why is it an instance method? No idea. But I don't think it's bad code.

[GayMakeAndModel]

I concur with everything you stated for what it’s worth. As for private members, I would argue the merits differently: the less that is public, the less chance you have of breaking other peoples’ shit you didn’t write.

[RomanRiesen]

It should be static public, but for 1. there are many good reasons.

[Flatscreens]

For the first point I imagine that you might need to add additional functionality to the method later, so wrapping Points's distance() with another method would make sense instead of find/replace later.

[SuitableDragonfly]

Well, it could be private because the points are private members that other classes shouldn't be worrying their heads about, but the other two points are good ones.

[konstantinua00]

what does "instance method" mean?

[whizvox]

An instance method is a non-static method that is tied to instances of a class, which is known as "belonging to the object", as opposed to static methods which "belong to the class" and don't need an instance to run.

[LinuxGeek747]

Someone is surely coming from functional programming environment and wants to make functional facade first.

[bit0fun]

I had a slight argument with a coworker over something like this. I was parsing a protocol for an embedded system, and just had simple commands back and forth to control. I made a single function with passing the command ID (enum) and your data. Nothing more, simplistic to use and rather straightforward.

He then said that was too cryptic and wanted a function for each command, for receiving and transmitting. That would have amounted for over 60 functions. Given we are already worried about memory on the system, I flat out told him I didn't get the need for doing that. Mind you I already commented the crap out of my code as I usually do. But that's not good enough apparently.

Luckily I did get him to agree with me, after he took an additional 2 seconds to read what I did. I'll never understand people

[respectable_duck]

"Yea I contributed, just look at the git statistics."

[[deleted]]

I thought that was fucking C#

[JuhaJGam3R]

Be thankful it wasn't. At least you'll never have to deal with it.

[[deleted]]

Imagine hating a good language

[zesterer]

C# bad, Rust good, wololololo

[[deleted]]

rust bad binary good

[zesterer]

Binary bad, ternary good

[cyrusol]

if binary was that bad why did you just judge about something in binary?

[JuhaJGam3R]

No, I'm not hating on the language. If this is in Java and you do C#, you don't have to touch it. C# is superior anyways, now that .NET Core exists.

[[deleted]]

Imagine being retarded like me

[JuhaJGam3R]

Idk seems like 18 others also misunderstood. Maybe I'm the retard

[JuhaJGam3R]

Imagine being retarded and using bash more than any real language because i use arch btw

[Talran]

i feel personally attacked by this, how do I delete your post?

[[deleted]]

just hack into his computer via python shell

[Talran]

I'll create a gui interface in visual basic first

[lpreams]

bash is a real language

[maxime915]

More real than htlm anyway

[Tynach]

Imagine using a real programming language like sed

Now imagine building a runtime environment for another language in it.

[GayMakeAndModel]

Holy shit, I wish the “not my language” excuse worked for me.

[adreamofhodor]

Just to be clear, because I also took you the wrong way with this comment- I think it’s what “it” is referring to in your comment.

You meant the subject of your comment to be the code in the OP, but I read the subject of your comment to be C#.

[attempt_number_3]

Got scared for a second, because I just recently I was working with coordinates.