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Comment by erikpukinskis | Hacker News Reader

This is great, I love explorations of how to represent code. (My masters thesis was a vaguely similar project: http://snowedin.net/windowinthebox/)

Lately, I find the best way to make my code more comprehensible is just to break it down into smaller pieces. The 300 lines of fuzzyset is pretty good! I find 150 lines is ideal, although I rarely understand the refactoring space well enough to hit that. 300 is more common, and 600-800 is not unheard of for me. And I code in 42 character width, so those are short lines, with smokers whitespace.

Forcing your code into single 150 line JavaScript file with a README and a published interface is a great way to force yourself to really understand the core concern. You squeeze out any and all orthogonal concerns into their own fully independent module. It clarifies the design to the point that the documentation has less to do.

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At the same time, I find that it's often hard to comprehend projects that are broken into too many little files. There's normally no guide on what pieces are where, so you don't know which order to read things. Makes it a little tougher to dive in. I just want to find the file that has the "meat", and I don't mind if that file is 1000+ lines long, especially if the code itself makes sense and is clear.

Completely agree. This is a common problem with object-oriented code bases. You've got hundreds of 20 line source files and the only way to decipher them is to trace the execution all the way from main() down to the last util class.

Agree.

But I’m advocating something much stronger than that: breaking them down into small modules each with a published interface.

You can see what all any given module depends on by looking at one set of imports at the top of one file.

Each of those has a github repo and a README, so it’s easy to find out what they do...

But most importantly, the architecture of such a library will be wholly different than what it would have been if developed as a monorepo.

My point is not really that this structure of code is ergonomic. It’s that forcing yourself to do things this way forces you to clarify the purpose of modules. And to discover interfaces which are truly orthogonal.

And that makes the code easier to understand.

> the file that has the "meat", and I don't mind if that file is 1000+ lines long

I prefer "meat" separated. And having clear boundaries. 1k+ lines is a bad sign.

Even if it's well-structured, why force your idea of how much I have to scroll?

And why making git diff overviews less useful? (glance over filenames)

> And I code in 42 character width, so those are short lines

I've never heard of an approach like this, how did you settle on 42? I'd be very interested to see an example if you have some code hosted somewhere?

My initial reaction is 42 is too short and would encourage terse non-descriptive naming and be a pain to deal with long strings.

Maybe he’s programming in APL

40 was a little too small, and 42 has been OK in practice!

I find it’s helpful because beating any structure beyond maybe 5 levels deep is painful, so I am forced to refactor.

Names aren’t so much of an issue because of the single-file-per-repo and 150-line-target principles:

If your module only consists of 150 lines, there’s just not enough in your namespace to need long names. Essentially, you only ever work within a small, isolated piece of a huge flat namespace.

Long names are necessitated by the huge, deep API surface that the filesystem provides.

What's smokers whitespace?

Oops autocorrect. Ample whitespace.

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