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From: Pancho <Pancho.Jones@proton.me>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: TeX and Pascal [was Re: The joy of FORTRAN]
Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2024 08:59:44 +0100
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
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On 10/1/24 16:14, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
> On 01/10/2024 15:57, Pancho wrote:
>> In essence just because you can do something clever, doesn't mean you 
>> should.
> 
> That is what I loathed about compscis. As practising software engineers 
> we specialised in 'good clean workmanlike well documented and structured 
>   code'.
> Our job was to get the puter to do its job in the most understandable 
> and maintainable way.
> Not to impress people with the elegance complexity and 
> incomprehensibility of our  REGEX statements.
> 
> If all we had was vi and a C compiler, that's what we used.
> And knowing that
>   p=(x>y?3:2);

Yeah, I remember people criticising this 30 years ago, but programmers 
are used to it now, so it doesn't confuse people.

> produced identical assembler to:
> if (x>y)
>      p=3;
> else
>      p=2;
> there was a strong temptation to use the latter as being sufficiently 
> simple for the time serving amateurs whose failure to complete the 
> project was why we we employed at all...
> 
> We weren't employed to be clever. We were employed to write working 
> code. And document it.
> 

Yes, it is best that code is obvious. Standard design patterns are good 
too. A familiar complex pattern, is much easier to understand than an 
unfamiliar one.,

Documentation can be problematic, in that people modify the code but not 
the comments. I tend to write a header comment block explaining what I 
initially designed a class is for. A story more than a line by line 
explanation. Like you, I also start by writing comments and then I fill 
in the code. That is to help me remember what I'm doing, like notes. 
Sometimes I leave these comments, sometimes I don't.