Linus' idea of "good taste" code

[Idan Arye via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 25 October 2016 at 22:53:54 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> It's a small bit, but the idea here is to eliminate if 
> conditionals where possible:
>
> https://medium.com/@bartobri/applying-the-linus-tarvolds-good-taste-coding-requirement-99749f37684a#.nhth1eo4e
>
> This is something we could all do better at. Making code a 
> straight path makes it easier to reason about and test.
>
> Eliminating loops is something D adds, and goes even further to 
> making code a straight line.
>
> One thing I've been trying to do lately when working with DMD 
> is to separate code that gathers information from code that 
> performs an action. (The former can then be made pure.) My code 
> traditionally has it all interleaved together.

I'd like to point to Joel Spolsky excellent article "Five Worlds" 
- http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FiveWorlds.html

TL;DR: Joel Spolsky argues that different types("worlds") of 
developments require different qualities and different 
priorities, both from the code and the process. Because of that, 
advice given by experts of one world does not necessary apply to 
other worlds, even if the expert is really smart and experienced 
and even if the advice was learned with great pain.

Linus Torvald is undoubtedly smart and experienced, but he 
belongs to the world of low-level kernels and filesystems code. 
Just because such code would be considered "tasteless" there 
doesn't mean it's tasteless everywhere.