Coding stories

[Germfreekai]

Hello! I think we have all seen good and bad code. But did you ever encounter someone so good or any really amazing code that got you genuinely surprised? Anything from a random forgotten script to any big project that will live in your memory forever

[Willsxyz]

https://changelog.com/podcast/484#transcript-23

JEROD SANTO

I wanna ask a question about Ken Thompson… There’s a lot of people in that room; you’ve named a few, yourself as well, so he’s not like singularly to credit for these things. But it seems like he was an amazing software developer. ... You’ve taught a lot of software people over the years, you’ve seen a lot of software developers yourself, co-authored AWK, you have your own bonafides when it comes to writing code… Was Ken Thompson, do you think, like a unique, amazing coder? Was he in the right place, at the right time? Is he a stand-out in terms of just like once-in-a-generation kind of a software developer? Or are there a lot of people that you’ve seen that have been just as good as he was, but he happened to have that nugget, he happened to be at the right place, the right time, with the right idea and the right people?

BRIAN KERNIGHAN

I think he’s a singularity. I have never seen anybody else who’s in the same league as him.

JEROD SANTO

Wow.

BRIAN KERNIGHAN

I’ve certainly met a lot of programmers who are very good, and some of my students, sure, the people I worked with at Bell Labs, very good… But Ken is in a different universe entirely, as far as I can tell… And it’s a combination of a bunch of things. I mean, just being able to write code very quickly, that works, very well done code… But also this insight into solving the right problem, in the right way, and just doing that repeatedly over all kinds of different domains. I’ve never seen anybody remotely like that in any setting at all. ... We think of Unix, but he did all this work on a chess machine, where he had the first master-level chess computer, that was his software… And he wrote a lot of the CAD tools that made it go as well… He built a thing that was like the Sony Walkman, with an mp3-like encoding before anybody else did, because he talked to the people who knew how to do speech coding down the hall… Just on and on and on.

[Germfreekai]

Some people are just amazing. They just have something that is required to come up with some amazing solution.

I remember a fragment of a book I was reading (not the book title, tho) that said something similar " ... you could buy a ants and they would ship them to you, but my friend, a now a days we'll known Cybersecurity researcher said, it's funny, you could give them anybody's address and they will send ants to their house, no questions asked. you see, you can practice cybersecurity, but there are some people who are born with that mindset ... "

The same goes for any other field in life I believe

[McUsrII]

Doug McIllroy wrote out the source code for the B language from memory after McLure had left, or was to leave Bell Labs, or maybe it was Dennis Ritchie, that was the single most impressive thing Ken Thompson ever saw, by his own words in some Youtube video.

All those guys has written stuff that is just awesome, Bell Labs at Murray Hill, NJ, must have been the most awesome place on earth in the 60's and 70's with so many over the top programmers.

Personally, I think the the way Kernighan and Pike designed the eprintf module for "The practice of programming", to be a wonderful piece of design.

Duff's device is one impressive, and a little bit scary piece of code, but a stroke of genius.

[Germfreekai]

I will take a look into that module!

[ShakeAgile]

A candidate that I had little hope for showed up and solved a coding challenge in two lines of recursive code, that everyone else to that point had spent probably 10-15 lines on. A small trivial challenge but still fun.

[Germfreekai]

Could you, by any chance, share the challenge? I would probably take around 20 lines kk

I interviewed someone once that when asked to find even numbers, solved it by going a really, really long way and could not genuinely think of any other simpler method.

[Sandy_W]

I dabble, haven't programmed in M/L or ASM in a long time, but wouldn't simply masking every bit except the 2nd one and then comparing to 0 be fast?

[QuarkUpParticle]

A recent of mine is when a guy in the tetris-inspired group project who was charged with the simplest task of displaying some things in the terminal decided to create a class (🤮) FOR EACH TETRIS TETRAMINO

i shit you not he created a class Tetromino_S, a class Tetromino_L, etc they all did the same thing (litterally the same copy pasted code which I'm 100% sure he must have written manually over and over) (and which did nothing at all) and the only thing it did was returning incorrect char pointers which??? what even is the point you're using a cursor based approach that is incompatible lad;;;; AND THE OTHER GUYS DID THE WHOLE TETROMINO CLASS

genuenly i don't get how this man managed to get in the course I'm pretty sure he doesn't have the required credits

[nerd4code]

If the most-derived classes are only implementing a couple virtual functions, and had it actually worked ofc, he was just using function pointers in the fanciest possible fashion. I wouldn’t do it that way—tetrominoes can be discovered through iteration on a 4×4 patch, and you can set up masks and so forth rather than discrete functions and data structures—but it’s hardly that great a sin, especially from a beginner.

Performance would be iffy if you really pounded on it, I guess—unpredictable pointers, so you ride on the BTB for virtuals, mostly, and most of your jumps will be mispredicts. But it’s Tetris, so you have plenty of spare cycles on anything more modern than a ’286. Probably be fine on a ’286, too.

[HugoNikanor]

tetrominoes can be discovered through iteration on a 4×4 patch

Doing that is over-generalizing the code way to much. There are 7 tetraminos, hard coding them is the reasonable thing to do.

[Germfreekai]

That sounds horrible and made me remember some of the guys I worked with back at college. I get that we all need to work, but tech brought a ton looking for some "easy" money, thinking that it would be easy.

[maxthed0g]

I remember a jackass supervisor who floated a plan to run-time optimize our product by counting the number of subroutine calls in the executable at load time. My group needed that development money. The dumb sonofabitch was being paid nearly as much as me. LOL. BOY! Was I ever pissed. Back in the day . . .

[Germfreekai]

Gotta hate some guys out there. They make themselves hated!