While we talk about maintainability, we all admire Fast Inverse Square algorithm.
Optimize for what best serves your purpose. If you have high team fluctuation, optimize for readability. If you develop a spacecraft, optimize for safety. If you ship audio gear, optimize for latency.
Or better: If you have high team fluctuation, optimize that first so your team is actually effective.
I skimmed through NASA’s coding manual a while back, and one of the things that I took away from it was that optimizing for readability is optimizing for safety.
It’s just that it’s hard for me to see it as readability because I’m not familiar with the problem domain. For example, their ban on reentrancy would definitely require me to rewire my brain a bit. But, for what they are doing, that is a readability decision: they needed to be able to guarantee that a spacecraft’s firmware couldn’t experience a stack overflow, and reentrant code makes it much harder to reason about stack growth.
For storing passwords in the clear, that should be obvious.
For null checks it may be more subtle, but consider the case of languages like Rust and Kotlin that let you eliminate null checks and replace them with static guarantees that a reference won’t be null. In noth cases that’s celebrated as a win for both safety and readability. So I’m inferring an unstated major premise that we’re talking about skipping null checks in functions where null cannot be formally eliminated from the function’s input domain. (Maybe we’re working in Java instead.) In which case I must insist that null checks are good for readability because they explicitly communicate important information about what arguments the function is willing to accept. It’s leaving that important information unstated and implicit that would be bad for readability.
i don't. that guy basically made the same game over and over again, while nearly everyone else was innovating in game design, reaching new audiences, etc. that's what change is about!
and then, he blows up the next thing he's put in charge of (VR), and blames everyone but himself. how many billions did he get and he couldn't figure it out? every bit of ethos from that guy was bad, it's not just the one little ethos of the hardcore little optimization algorithm, it's every ethos.
I personally think he was enormously successful in VR, just not in a market sense but in a technology and UX sense. In my opinion VR is still yet to come to a mass adoption, just not in the "second life" fantasy, but in the "replacement for workspace monitors" kind of way.
> Optimize for what best serves your purpose. If you have high team fluctuation, optimize for readability. If you develop a spacecraft, optimize for safety. If you ship audio gear, optimize for latency.
I fully agree with that.
Wow, TIL.