home bbs files messages ]

Forums before death by AOL, social media and spammers... "We can't have nice things"

   comp.os.linux.misc      Linux-specific topics not covered by oth      135,536 messages   

[   << oldest   |   < older   |   list   |   newer >   |   newest >>   ]

   Message 135,167 of 135,536   
   =?UTF-8?Q?St=C3=A9phane?= CARPENTIE to All   
   Re: The Value of a 2nd Look At Code   
   31 Jan 26 10:16:27   
   
   From: sc@fiat-linux.fr   
      
   Le 25-01-2026, Charlie Gibbs  a écrit :   
   > On 2026-01-25, Stéphane CARPENTIER  wrote:   
   >   
   >> Well, a lot of times, the process stops when it works. I don't remember   
   >> who said that code is not finish when there is nothing more to add but   
   >> when there is nothing more to remove.   
   >   
   > Antoine de Saint-Exupéry   
      
   OK, I'm not proud to have forgotten that. He was probably more speaking   
   about writing books than writing code, but there are a lot of   
   similarities in the two processes.   
      
   >> That's why it's stupid to consider the best programmer as the one who   
   >> produce more lines of code than others.   
   >   
   > Unless you're being paid by the line.   
      
   If that exist for writing articles in some newspapers (well more   
   precisely they are payed by the word which is strongly correlated), I   
   never heard of it for writing code.   
      
   Which would be a very bad idea because people would start to put one   
   word by line every time it's possible (it looks easy in C or javascript,   
   I'm not sure it's possible in python). And the programs would be   
   unreadable. It would encourage obfuscation.   
      
   So, I'm happy I never heard about a programmer paid by the line and I   
   strongly hope I'll never heard about that.   
      
   >> And, from what I saw, actually, the AI produce a lot of code which must   
   >> be removed.   
   >   
   > Reminds me of my early days when I'd take over maintenance of someone   
   > else's code - or code that "just grew".  I'd typically reduce the line   
   > count by 30% - or even 50% in some cases.   
      
   I never saw your code, but I'm pretty sure it's not the same garbage.   
      
   More than often I saw AI code putting useless lines decreasing the speed   
   of the program. For example, one unused variable initiated in a very   
   strange way looking for unheard environmental variables treating them   
   complexly and, to the end, even if the environmental variable did exist,   
   replace its value by an empty string. So, if a modern computer this   
   useless initiation doesn't take much time, it obfuscates the code and if   
   too many of them are present, it can start to have some impacts.   
      
   I never saw anything like that in code written by humans.   
      
   --   
   Si vous avez du temps à perdre :   
   https://scarpet42.gitlab.io   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)   

[   << oldest   |   < older   |   list   |   newer >   |   newest >>   ]


(c) 1994,  bbs@darkrealms.ca