
"I was really excited to write this article, because it gave me an excuse to really think about what beautiful code is. I still don't think I know, and maybe it's entirely subjective. I do think the two biggest things, for me at least, are stylistic indenting and maximum const-ness. A lot of the stylistic choices are definitely my personal preferences, and I'm sure other programmers will have different opinions. I think the choice of what style to use is up to whoever has to read and write the code, but I certainly think it's something worth thinking about. I would suggest everyone look at the Doom 3 source code
because I think it exemplifies beautiful code, as a complete package: from system design down to how to tab space the characters." John Carmack himself
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Member since:
2009-08-18
Normally most formatting problems can be sorted with the IDE.
TBH a lot of the problems you describe are more to do with the way the applications have been written and not the language itself. I am sure I can point you to some of the atrocities I have seen in C# (my favourite being the INullObject interface I recently found).
Personally I like VB.NET, while the syntax is odd you can write code pretty quickly. My main issue with the language is that it is difficult to see the difference at a glace between an array and a procedure/function.
A lot of newer developers especially those coming from Python or Ruby find the use of a semi-colon slightly arduous. There was recently a flame war between Douglas Crockford and one of Twitter Bootstrap developer over whether you should make of the JavaScript semi-colon insertion mechanism.
Edited 2013-01-16 13:16 UTC