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As I write more and more code, the more I want simplicity

I had a 24 year old developer report to me that apparently thought his bonuses were tied to how many operations he did on a single line of code.

He consistently wrote unbelievably complex lambda expressions with multiple conditional operators that would make a single line take up at least 1.5 screenfulls in Visual Studio on a 1920x1080 resolution monitor. These lines were impossible to debug and had to be inevitably broken up.

For a while I thought he was following the conventions laid forth in:

https://www.thc.org/root/phun/unmaintain.html

...but he really seemed to be genuinely thinking he was accomplishing something good by doing this.

I'm with you though. I'll take simplicity.



Ha! "Exploit Compiler Name Length Limits"

I worked for many years on a FoxPro application with a 10-character limit. The first version of the program was written under a two character limit. This never bothered my boss, who was a terrible typist and always used short names anyway. But I at some point took up the practice of descriptive names, on top of the Hungarian notation we'd adopted for sanity. So I was exceeding the limit all over the place.

Ten years later, guess who had to convert the program to VFP, which has no variable name limit. And no compile-time checks on variables, even when they are declared. Glad that year's over.


Well it depends how you do it. There's certainly some mileage in doing it like that properly:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/lukeh/archive/2007/10/01/taking-linq...


Over the board or just expressive? http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/261893




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