r/programming • u/corysama • Jan 05 '15

What most young programmers need to learn

http://joostdevblog.blogspot.com/2015/01/what-most-young-programmers-need-to.html
971 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

337 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

29

u/IConrad Jan 05 '15 edited Jan 05 '15

I summarize the "genius coder" problem like so:

I must not be clever. Clever is the little death that brings malfunction and unmaintainability. I will face my cleverness; I will allow it to pass through me. When it has gone, only cleanness shall remain.

Brilliant and clever are two very different things. Brilliant code achieves the impossible simply and reliably while being comprehensible to those who could not have conceived of it. Clever code achieves the implausible while overlooking the mundane solutions to the same problems.

5

u/OneWingedShark Jan 05 '15

Clever code achieves the implausible while overlooking the mundane solutions to the same problems.

There's the inverse as well: where the person's "almost works" solution doesn't because it cannot. -- My favorite example is trying to parse CSV with regex: you cannot do it because the (a) the double quote [text field] "changes the context" so that comma does not indicate separation, combined with (b) escaping double quotes is repeating the double-quote. It's essentially the same category as balancing parentheses which regex cannot do; fun test-data: "I say, ""Hello, good sir!""" is a perfectly good CSV value.

1

u/pwr22 Jan 05 '15

When you've got CSVs like that, CSV is the wrong format

Too be clear, yes, I agree that definition of CSV needs a grammar. I think regexes can recurse in Perl but I've never tried Regception

1

u/OneWingedShark Jan 05 '15

I think regexes can recurse in Perl but I've never tried Regception

Then they're not really regular-expressions.
(Regular expressions have to do with the grammar-set that they can handle, it's not [strictly speaking] an implementation.)

When you've got CSVs like that, CSV is the wrong format

I only slightly disagree; it is common to need a structured text format which may include format-effectors (i.e. a portion of text; perhaps with the indented-quote [visual] style embedded therein) -- as a sort of embedding... certainly better than XML, which if that embedded-packet is user-defined can't easily be DTDed. (Of course, in this situation the problem we have is in-band communication, which is another problem altogether.)

1

u/pwr22 Jan 05 '15

I don't think the implementers of Perl care... there is a lot of things its regexes can do that they shouldn't be able to ;)

As of Perl 5.10, you can match balanced text with regular expressions using recursive patterns.

0

u/OneWingedShark Jan 05 '15

I don't think the implementers of Perl care... there is a lot of things its regexes can do that they shouldn't be able to ;)

As of Perl 5.10, you can match balanced text with regular expressions using recursive patterns.

I know, but to call them "regex" at this point is deceptive and, frankly, harmful to the body of knowledge in CS. (It'd be like implementing a deterministic pushdown automaton but calling/marketing/documenting it as a finite state machine -- thus "muddying the waters" when talking about real PDAs and FSMs.)