Funny I remember looking at the Doom 3 Source a few years ago and having the opposite reaction. Looked awful. Still does. It is basically C with classes.

On Monday, 14 January 2013 at 22:53:05 UTC, FG wrote:
> On 2013-01-14 22:31, mist wrote:
>> That guy has rather weird sense of beauty... My eyes started bleeding at the
>> "Spacing" section.
>
>
> I sympathize. He posted the worse code excerpt to prove his point. :)
>

I am most unpleasant with vertical space point. Times when screen space was that important are long gone - I generally can understand less at once than can possibly fit with 9th font size on 24 inch screen. And extra vertical spaces are like semantic formatting tools for plain text - can group related blocks perfectly and speed up reading.

Walter Bright:

> http://kotaku.com/5975610/the-exceptional-beauty-of-doom-3s-source-code?post=56177550

From the article:

> [Side note: John Carmack has stated that static analysis tools
> revealed that their common bug was incorrect parameter matching
> in printf(). I wonder if they've changed to stringstreams in
> Rage because of this. GCC and clang both find printf()
> parameter matching errors with -Wall, so you don't need
> expensive static analysis tools to find these errors.]

I'd like the D front-end to statically detect wrong parameter matching errors for the write*()/format() functions. (In D I don't use "%s" all the time).

----------------------

H. S. Teoh

> The prevalent hatred for templates is mostly the fault
> of poorly-chosen syntax on C++'s part.

The syntax of C++ templates is a problem, but it's not their main problem. The main problem is them being untyped. The Rust language (tries to) remove this problem copying the best parts of the typeclasses from Haskell, but making them efficient for a system language. (The redesign of the C++ concepts try to do the same, but as usual for C++ it will be a greatly over-engineered solution).

Bye,
bearophile

mist:

> I am most unpleasant with vertical space point. Times when screen space was that important are long gone - I generally can understand less at once than can possibly fit with 9th font size on 24 inch screen.

I prefer a larger font and less wasted lines.
The very very airy style of C# coding worsens my code understanding.


> And extra vertical spaces are like semantic formatting tools for plain text - can group related blocks perfectly and speed up reading.

The idea of not wasting lines doesn't go against the idea of adding blank lines to create code paragraphs. When you are adding a line to divide chunks, you are not wasting vertical space, it's a well used line :-)

Bye,
bearophile

On Tue, Jan 15, 2013 at 12:48:13AM +0100, bearophile wrote:
> mist:
> 
> >I am most unpleasant with vertical space point. Times when screen space was that important are long gone - I generally can understand less at once than can possibly fit with 9th font size on 24 inch screen.
> 
> I prefer a larger font and less wasted lines.
> The very very airy style of C# coding worsens my code understanding.

+1.

Larger font makes it easier on my eyes. I always maximize any code window and increase the font size until its roughly 80 columns.


> >And extra vertical spaces are like semantic formatting tools for plain text - can group related blocks perfectly and speed up reading.
> 
> The idea of not wasting lines doesn't go against the idea of adding blank lines to create code paragraphs. When you are adding a line to divide chunks, you are not wasting vertical space, it's a well used line :-)
[...]

+1.


T

-- 
Why can't you just be a nonconformist like everyone else? -- YHL

On 01/15/2013 12:26 AM, mist wrote:
> On Monday, 14 January 2013 at 22:53:05 UTC, FG wrote:
>> On 2013-01-14 22:31, mist wrote:
>>> That guy has rather weird sense of beauty... My eyes started bleeding
>>> at the
>>> "Spacing" section.
>>
>>
>> I sympathize. He posted the worse code excerpt to prove his point. :)
>>
>
> I am most unpleasant with vertical space point.

I think it is one of the more sensible ones. Completely unrelated to code beauty though.

> Times when screen space was that important are long gone

This generally comes up as an argument in these discussions, but I don't buy it. Not all development is done on a desktop with a huge screen. And even then, there is always something to put on it. What window manager are you using?

> - I generally can understand less at
> once than can possibly fit with 9th font size on 24 inch screen.

In my experience, the screen is always too small. I prefer font size 12 though.

> And extra vertical spaces are like semantic formatting tools for plain text
> - can group related blocks perfectly and speed up reading.

Sure, I do that too when appropriate. That is not an excuse for wasting space gratuitously, making them harder to spot.

Ultimately, it is entirely a matter of habituation. (So you might as well just prefer the format that is more efficient.)

On Tue, Jan 15, 2013 at 12:57:17AM +0100, Timon Gehr wrote:
> On 01/15/2013 12:26 AM, mist wrote:
[...]
> >- I generally can understand less at once than can possibly fit with 9th font size on 24 inch screen.
> 
> In my experience, the screen is always too small. I prefer font size 12 though.
[...]

I use font size at least 15. :-P Well, it depends on what resolution I'm running at.  For 1280x1024, I use about 15. For my home PC running at 1600x1200, I use 18 or 20. I find anything less than 14 straining on my eyes, and anything below 12 painful.

I'm a stickler for 80 column text terminals. I find that anything much larger than that tends to be unwieldy because your eyes have to scan too far a horizontal distance per line. And I like the 80 columns to fill the entire width of the screen. (I have stopped believing in tiling or overlapping windows. Maximize everything FTW.)

But then again, I don't expect anyone else to share my peculiar configuration.  :-P


T

-- 
MS Windows: 64-bit overhaul of 32-bit extensions and a graphical shell for a 16-bit patch to an 8-bit operating system originally coded for a 4-bit microprocessor, written by a 2-bit company that can't stand 1-bit of competition.

Well, personally I love this simple and accurate C-style look. I'm not a fan of syntax sugar and operator overloading and I would prefer:

arr.insertKey("myword", value); instead of arr["myword"] = value;

Here I emphasize that I'm inserting new key and not modifying the value of already present.

At the same time you have to use OOP style call arr.remove("word").

And I'm very happy to have nested structs, class and functions in D. :-)

I seem to be managing to hit the "Reply" button instead of the "Followup" button more often than is desirable.  (What happened to the days when "Reply" meant "Followup" in newsreaders?)

On 14/01/2013 19:24, Walter Bright wrote:
> Quite a nice read on the coding style used in Doom.
>
> http://kotaku.com/5975610/the-exceptional-beauty-of-doom-3s-source-code?post=56177550

Am I the only one who expected, on seeing the subject line, something about a coding style that relies heavily on exceptions?

But I agree with most of the points made.  Make code self-documenting. And compact, but not at the expense of readability.  Sometimes I see code that doesn't seem to be intended as an IO*CC entry, nor an attempt to "protect" the code or squash it into as little space as possible for release, and yet is so obfuscated that I don't know how the maintainers manage to maintain it (let alone decide against deobfuscating it).

I also noticed this:

"Removing a value from an std::vector is dumb too:

vec.erase(std::remove(vec.begin(), vec.end(), val), vec.end());

Gee, that's going to be typed correctly by every programmer every time!"

It seems that even the writer of that piece hasn't typed it correctly - from what I can make out, that code would remove everything _except_ val from vec.  Either that or it wouldn't work at all, since the vector returned by remove is no longer a plain vector iterator.

(Moreover, any clue what possessed the author of that piece to make every code sample an image, thereby destroying accessibility and making it impossible to c&p?)

And it isn't clear what he means by "real tabs"....

Stewart.

On 01/15/2013 01:55 AM, Stewart Gordon wrote:
> I seem to be managing to hit the "Reply" button instead of the
> "Followup" button more often than is desirable.  (What happened to the
> days when "Reply" meant "Followup" in newsreaders?)
> ...

I assume you are using thunderbird, because that changed its layout fairly recently. You can fix this by right-clicking on the button -> 'Customize...' IIRC.