Well, between a run of the mill programmer who happens to indent where he/she should vs Norvig, I will likely choose the latter If I could.
Reminds me of that blog thread where this design pattern guru hemmed and hawed from his high horse over several posts about how to write constrained based solvers and still did not get to a piece of code that actually solved the problem, whereas Norvig just posted a simple solution. A few non-idiomatic indents here and there (although his style has never been a problem for me) are nothing really.
>Well, between a run of the mill programmer who happens to indent where he/she should vs Norvig, I will likely choose the latter If I could.
Right.
>Reminds me of that blog thread where this design pattern guru hemmed and hawed from his high horse
I read a similar story a while ago. Two programmers are given the task of writing a program for some non-trivial problem.
One of them, Hoity Toity Harry, tries to apply many of the latest and greatest algorithms, techniques, paradigms, etc., to impress people (of course).
The other, Down To Earth Dan, just strives for a good implementation, with reasonably good algorithms, etc. After a while, Dan finishes his program and does a test run. It works well enough for the task. Meanwhile, Harry is not even near to finishing his code, due to struggling with complexities of the techniques he has tried to use.
The boss comes in, sees the results, and congratulates Down To Earth Dan.
Hoity Toity Harry, of course, has to protest, trying to put down Down To Earth Dan's implementation, saying that it uses simple algorithms, etc., while his own code uses sophisticated, state of the art techniques. Dan replies: "Yes, I could also have used those things. But my program runs, and yours doesn't."
Okay, I changed the programmers' names for fun and effect, but I really did read the story, in some good (and pragmatic) software book, a while ago.
Speaking of which, I once saw a user review of Norvig's book PAIP complaining about the unsophisticated code -- no monads, etc. (I forget what other patterns the reviewer wanted to see.)
Reminds me of that blog thread where this design pattern guru hemmed and hawed from his high horse over several posts about how to write constrained based solvers and still did not get to a piece of code that actually solved the problem, whereas Norvig just posted a simple solution. A few non-idiomatic indents here and there (although his style has never been a problem for me) are nothing really.