Sword Saints

Open source code poetry

I'm almost finished going through Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, so now I need to find an open source project that I can do a little work with so I can keep the coding skills at least somewhat honed. Happy day, Quicksilver is now open source. I hope I can jump on board with that.

MacSword is another possibility, though it looks like development hasn't moved on that one in quite some time.

Bad comment

It doesn't give me the warm fuzzies when I see a comment like this hanging around in vendor code:

/* Eventually get this to work. */

The funny thing is that that's my feeling on the whole software package, given that I've spent a couple days hacking it up enough just to get it to compile in our environment. And it looks like getting it to link with our operating system could take the better part of next week (oh, how I hate the "undefined reference").

Well, it's job security, I guess.

Code as art

Software geeks can be a touchy lot from time to time. I had to share some soothing words with a coworker who'd gotten a little fired up about someone changing the formatting of his code. (OK, so I also took the time to crack a little joke about that being understandable since he never formats his code to fit in an 80-column window.) While his reaction to this infraction might have been over the top, I do have to stand with him on principle. Maybe it's just the concept of ownership -- it's not my code unless it looks like my code. Maybe we just take pride in our work. Or maybe we're all just nit-picking perfectionists.

My personal preference runs something like the following: curly braces go on their own lines, four space indentations, NO tabs, and everything formatted for an 80-column window. Parentheses go with the expressions, not the function/keyword. Comments are set apart for easy reading (formatted as haiku or limericks or plain old prose, depending on my mood).

/*
 * My comments tend to go something like
 * this most of the time.
 */
if (x > 0)
{
    printf("Do something!\n");
}

I like that kind of code. OK, so it has a lot of whitespace. Disk space and memory are cheap these days. I find this type of code easy to maintain, easy to read, easy to understand. But I must be out of touch with the rest of the programming world, because I've found the following (or something like it) to be much more common:

/* This comment is just a hat, barely distinguishable from the code */
if(x > 0){
   printf("Do something!\n");
}

Sure, it's compressed, fitting more code into a tighter space. It's a little more effort to figure out what things are doing (especially if you miss that curly brace on the same line as your statement). And, frankly, I just don't find it aesthetically pleasing. Browsing through code like that is akin to a trip through a museum of modern art -- I go away scratching my head and thinking, "What the heck was that?"

And yes, I'm the type of guy who's wasted a little bit of time reformatting code to my liking, especially if I'm forced to spend any length of time editing it. Ownership? Pride? Or nit-picking perfectionism? I think I'll go with the latter.

My kind of programming

I took my first little foray into OSX programming yesterday, the little "Hello World" tutorial Apple offers for Cocoa applications. It was a joyous occasion. It's going to take some time before I'm at all proficient with the tools and the framework, but it looks like it could be a lot of fun. (And all the tools come with the computer! There's no need for me to spend extra hundreds of dollars to buy the development suite!) I think I'll cut my teeth on a simple weblog client so I can post without using a browser. Yes, I know there's some really good stuff out there, but if I just go and pay for it then I'll never learn, will I?

And besides, at least this way I'll have a reminder of what successful programming is like. My experience with embedded programming has been a whole lot of banging your head against a wall until your skull is crushed and your brain can ooze through the cracks. And sometimes that's just not very motivating.