[ale] Any language (wuz: Assembly Language?)

[JD]

On 10/28/2013 01:28 PM, Jim Kinney wrote:
> I must admin that mandatory whitespace felt odd at first. But after 15+ years of
> OPC (Other People's Code) I'm convinced that ALL languages should fail to
> compile/run on sloppy code. Maybe a bit of tough love on a group I now consider
> to be highly unprofessional would thin the herd a bit.

I've used compilers that accept crap code input, but produced very pretty output
showing proper nesting levels based on what the compiler parsed. Very cool. This
was in an environment where we couldn't touch a line of code just to fix
indentation and every error caused was tracked by 100+ people.  I caused 2 "DRs"
in my 5 yrs there, but 1 wasn't my fault (latent bug) and I'd asked for 5
experts opinions prior to the formal reviews. Nobody saw it AND it got through 6
levels of formal testing (each by a different group) before it was discovered
about 10 months later. ;)

Proper indentation is a "nice to have" - but that is why indent++ was created,
correct?

> I started on Fortran which had it's own idiosyncrasies on punch cards. Pascal
> was a bad experience. Years of perl introduced a plethora of Really Bad Habits.
> Bash let me shoot myself in the foot so much that I forced myself to clean up
> just to preserve my sanity. Python was a breath of fresh air in the clutter that
> was my VIm screen. I don't do much in python now but I pretty much kept the just
> so everything else is readable later. OPC is expected to be bad, unreadable
> crap. When you start putting your own code in the OPC category, it's time to
> rethink some bad habits.

It is possible to create crap code in any language, of that I am certain.  Some
of my recent perl stuff is just a gorgeous as the highly reviewed code that
introduced those catastrophic bugs. Being pretty does not guaranty bug-free. I'd
submit that pretty code makes finding bugs harder ... sometimes.

<snipped for your benefit>