My experience is that being fastidious about code formatting is independent of one's ability as a developer. i.e. not a good indicator either way.
People then develop fastidious code formatting rules because they realize well formatted code is easier to read and extend.
Then people realize it’s the organization of the code, not the rules themselves. They have preferences, but don’t treat those preferences as “the one true way”.
So people with fastidious rules are in that middle ground of becoming less bad, and that’s a wide swath of abilities.
Yup, I agree with this
It's not about, let's say, where your curly braces stay, but being consistent
Though in some cases I'd argue that things like a very strict 80 character limit actually results in worse code (or at least worse to read code)
Smarter people write shittier code.
Clean code is for stupider people.
Think about it. It’s because smart people don’t need clean code. It’s so trivial to them and so readable that they really don’t need things to be ultra clean and well formatted.
So the tendency to have this ocd need to write clean code among smart people is random. They either have it or they don’t give a shit.
But among stupid people it’s not random. They need clean code because they are not smart enough to understand code that isn’t clean.
Smart people don’t often know how smart they are and don’t realize how unreadable their code is until code review time and the stupid person points out what the smart person considered “obvious”
That being said what I talk about lives on a gradient. The smarter you are the greater degree of tendency you have to write shitty code.
The cleaner your code the higher possible chance you are stupider. It’s not a definitive sign but there is a correlation.
It was from Charles Simonyi, talking about how as he got older, his prodigious ability to juggle large amounts of information in his head declined, and as a result, he started writing better code. Do you know it?
Also, I half agree with your point, but I see it happen in two different ways. When writing ad hoc code for research purposes, I see very gifted people write seemingly sloppy, to-the-point code because it's the quickest way to the result. I say seemingly sloppy because another programmer would see an intricate mechanism that in so many places is a hair's breadth from being wrong, and they would want to reorganize it to make it more obvious that the code is correct. The savant who wrote the code is like, it's already 100% obvious, how could any change make it more obvious than that?
In the software development context, I sometimes see very gifted people write incredibly complex code because they enjoy flexing their intellectual muscles and seeing the ornate towers they can create. But I also see average programmers and dumb programmers do the same thing, the only difference being that the gifted people can get away with more before it starts to hurt them. What's more, I see very good engineers, gifted but not as gifted, try to follow the example of a savant and end up accomplishing far less than they could if they cut themselves a break and wrote plain code without all the flourishes and ornaments. A gifted programmer usually gets tired of this and grows out of it, but some of them enjoy it so much they commit to fooling themselves and other people that it's the right way to write software.
> So the tendency to have this ocd need to write clean code among smart people is random
It is if they work entirely alone and their work doesn't depend at all on the success of others using their code. However, when it comes to big software projects, my experience is that it's not random: the smartest people do end up writing good code, unless they have ulterior motivations or a severe social blind spot.
Shitty code doesn't run or doesn't do what the author thinks it's supposed to do. You can't write genuinely shitty code and be smart.
I've seen smart people get caught in trying to write "clever" code. Abusing features of a language to make the code "look" smart. And I've never seen someone I've considered smart write completely unformatted code where it matters.
I may not agree with all of their choices, but the smartest people I've worked with tend to have the structure of the code reflect the structure of the problem as they see it in their head. And yes, that tracks, you begin to use the code itself as an assistant to your own thinking. You don't think about where things are because they are where they should be.
Forcing yourself to remember a bunch of pointless minutiae in order to write software isn't a mark of intelligence, it's a mark of someone who wants to be seen as intelligent.
> Then you've never been around the smartest people. Likely you've been around smarter then average people.
This is essentially using your own belief as proof that your belief is correct. You say I haven't been around the smartest people because I say the smartest people don't do what you claim. You are saying "I'm right therefore you are wrong". Maybe you haven't been around the smartest people.
> Yeah and the smartest people structure the problem in their head in a way normal people can't easily understand. They can hold much more in their head so the structures can be complex.
Complex is easy. Simple is hard. And yes, some things are inherently more complex than others. But the goal is to hold the important things in your head. Offload as much as you can so you can focus on what matters.
> Isn't that my point? Formatting rules are a bunch of pointless minutiae to intelligent people. It doesn't assist them in readability because their intelligence allows them to parse even the shittiest code with complete ease. And I mean aesthetically shitty, not intrinsically shitty.
No. It's not the point you are making.
Also, look at to everything I said. Strict adherence to any one style is not a marker of intelligence. I explicitly said that strict adherence is essentially for people in a wide range of skills. But the best have preferences, but realize that they are more guidelines and readability matters more than the rules.
And the rules should be logical and essentially second nature. Like indenting is completely optional in most languages. But proper indenting allows you to better visualize the flow of the code. Nobody reads/writes minified JavaScript.
I have quantitative evidence of this. There IQs were above 150.
>Complex is easy. Simple is hard. And yes, some things are inherently more complex than others. But the goal is to hold the important things in your head. Offload as much as you can so you can focus on what matters.
complex is not easy. And simple is not necessarily always hard. The story is obviously more complex then this.
>No. It's not the point you are making.
It is. It was a rhetorical question.
I looked at everything you said. First off I never said anything about strict adeherence to a style. Smart people have there preferences.
>And the rules should be logical and essentially second nature. Like indenting is completely optional in most languages. But proper indenting allows you to better visualize the flow of the code. Nobody reads/writes minified JavaScript.
I've seen smart people who can do this. They don't even really care.
This is totally unfalsifiable. I claim that the smartest people around always wear clown shoes to work. If you disagree, it's simply because you haven't met any of the people I'm talking about. QED
It's like proving the ground exists when you jump off the bed in the morning. The overly nerdy and stupid HNer can't even move an inch off the bed until the scientific method is employed in attempt to falsify whether the groun doesn't exist. OoooooOOh.
I'm just offering my anecdota opinion here. If you can't listen to normal conversation and you can only read research papers (which mind you suffers from a replication crisis) then more power to you.
So, code is harder to read than it is to write.
So if you write code that uses your full intellect to write it out, you are therefore by definition too dumb to read it.
They are likely writing code with a fraction of their intellect and that code is still too complicated for normal people to comprehend.
His code was really anal.
I have come to learn that there are no "rules," only heuristics.
For example, there's a large chunk of code following an if statement, but it's indented the same as the body of the if. The dev overlooks the closing brace and puts the logic in the wrong place. Additionally, there is a nested if statement whose body is indented less than the surrounding code. It's hard to read, and error prone.
I can't imagine a "good" developer putting up with that, although I admit you don't have to be "fastidious" to prevent this type of thing.