(Was: On 80 columns should (not) be enough for everyone)

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 01/31/2011 01:18 AM, foobar wrote:
> Andrei Alexandrescu Wrote:
>
>> == Quote from Walter Bright (newshound2 at digitalmars.com)'s article
>>> foobar wrote:
>>>> ATM, Phobos ranks extremely poorly in this regard. Far worse than C++ which
>>>> is by far one of worst ever. both Java and C# are surprisingly high on this
>>>> list and are behind various "new-age" scripting languages such as python and
>>>> Ruby and languages that were designed to be readable by humans such as
>>>> Smalltalk.
>>> I think you've mixed up libraries with languages. Please rephrase so we know
>>> what you're referring to and give specifics.
>>
>> Seconded. Also there is this one presupposition that reflects poorly on foobar's argument: that choosing foobar's
>> preferred convention inherently makes the code more accessible. In fact, a stronger argument could be made to
>> the contrary as we're talking about a maximum and 80<  120.
>>
>> Andrei from the ER
>
> That's just incorrect since I didn't even specify my style convention.
> As I said multiple times before, Phobos is design with Andrei in mind: meaning that if you are Andrei-like (or if you _are_ indeed Andrei) it would be easy to read and use. Otherwise it confusing as hell and hard to navigate.

But that goes for anyone, including your code. Code written in foobar's 
style is designed with foobar in mind: meaning that if you are 
foobar-like (or if you _are_ indeed foobar) it would be easy to read and 
use. Otherwise it is confusing as hell and hard to navigate.

I can only assume you'd have a hard time writing code that does not have 
foobar's signature. Same here.

Besides, it seems to have worked for me; at work I'm not considered one 
of the more obfuscated coders. Also, I wrote a little library Loki which 
is regarded as very small and readable for what it does. Its 
functionality has been shadowed by the much larger and comprehensive 
Boost, but Loki's code has always been the simplest and cleanest 
although it implements rather advanced concepts. Do you have any 
publicly available samples of your work that we might look at?

> In addition, you now want to force artificial limits that don't make
> any sense.
>
> You completely miss the most important principle - it doesn't matter
> how good and efficient your product is if no one's using it. Phobos
> is a very good product that I for one will never use. Just looking at
> the one huge page for algorithms is enough to discourage many
> people.

 From what I've seen, everyone who advocates D2 mentions std.algorithm 
as one of its main strengths, and never as a liability. I have 
difficulty reconciling that signal with one opinion relayed anonymously.


Andrei