Ligatures 🤢🤮🤮
Sadly, that’s not code Linus wrote. Nor one he merged. (It’s from git, copied from rsync, committed by Junio)
Isn’t that from 1991 while the quote is from 1995? If we’re nitpicking maybe we shouldn’t time travel 🤓
He wouldn’t make that statement unless he experienced the horror himself.
Now, if he still does it these days…
I’ve heard similar from the worst first year CS students you could ever meet. People talk out their ass without the experience to back up their observations constantly. The indentation thing is a reasonable heuristic that states you are adding too much complexity at specific points in your code that suggests you should isolate core pieces of logic into discrete functions. And while that’s broadly reasonable, this often has the downside of you producing code that has a lot of very small, very specific functions that are only ever invoked by other very small, very specific functions. It doesn’t make your code easier to read or understand and it arguably leads to scenarios in which your code becomes very disorganized and needlessly opaque purely because you didn’t want additional indentation in order to meet some kind of arbitrary formatting guideline you set for yourself. This is something that happens in any language but some languages are more susceptible to it than others. PEP8’s line length limit is treated like biblical edict by your more insufferable python developers.
Only the sith deal in absolutes
While I totally agree with that philosophy, it heavily depends on the language.
For Rust, my philosophy is more like this:
- Impl + fn body don’t count, as well as async blocks if they span the whole function
- do not nest more than one if statement. You probably better using guard clauses or matches
- do not put loops into an if statement.
- do not nest loops unless clearly shown to be (X, Y) indexing
- method chaining is free
- do not nest closures, unless the nested closure doesn’t have a {} block
- do not use mod unless it’s test for the current module. No I don’t want to Star Wars scroll your 1000 line file. Split it.
Why have an async block spanning the whole function when you can mark the function as async? That’s 1 less level of indentation. Also, this quite is unusable for rust. A single match statement inside a function inside an impl is already 4 levels of indentation.
A single match statement inside a function inside an impl is already 4 levels of indentation.
How about this?
The preferred way to ease multiple indentation levels in a
switchstatement is to align theswitchand its subordinatecaselabels in the same column instead of double-indenting the case labels. E.g.:
switch (suffix) {
case 'G':
case 'g':
mem <<= 30;
break;
case 'M':
case 'm':
mem <<= 20;
break;
case 'K':
case 'k':
mem <<= 10;
/* fall through */
default:
break;
}
I had some luck applying this to match statements. My example:
let x = 5;
match x {
5 => foo(),
3 => bar(),
1 => match baz(x) {
Ok(_) => foo2(),
Err(e) => match maybe(e) {
Ok(_) => bar2(),
_ => panic!(),
}
}
_ => panic!(),
}
Is this acceptable, at least compared to the original switch statement idea?
i personally find this a lot less readable than the switch example. the case keywords at the start of the line quickly signify its meaning, unlike with => after the pattern. though i dont speak for everybody.
It’s a lot less readable imo. As well than a cargo fmt later and it’s gone (unless there’s a nightly setting for it)
Well, of course you can have few indent levels by just not indenting, I don’t think the readability loss is worth it though. If I had give up some indentation, I’d probably not indent the impl {} blocks.
One nit: whatever IDE is displaying single-character surrogates for == and != needs to stop. In a world where one could literally type those Unicode symbols in, and break a build, I think everyone is better off seeing the actual syntax.
I think it’s a lineature. FiraCide does that for example, and I like it very much. My compiler and lsp will tell me if there is a bad char there. Besides, the linea tires take the same space as two regular characters, so you can tell the difference.
It’s not the 90s anymore. My editor can look nice.