The exceptional beauty of Doom 3’s source code
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 15th Jan 2013 21:24 UTC
General Development "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 replies in the comments.
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RE[3]: Good article
by ssokolow on Wed 16th Jan 2013 06:28 UTC in reply to "RE[2]: Good article"
ssokolow
Member since:
2010-01-21

I personally think list comprehensions are a cool feature and should be used more, not just in Python. It may be harder to figure out what it does, but at a glance, at least you can tell what kind of things are in the list.


I normally agree wholeheartedly (one of many reasons why I love using CoffeeScript in place of writing Javascript directly), but even they can be abused.

See, for example, this inefficient one-liner I've used as a disposable snippet for doing 90% of the parsing of simple, un-sectioned, unquoted rcfile-like key=value files in reference-counted implementations of Python:

dict([line.strip().split('=') for line in open(whatever) if line.strip() and not line.lstrip().startswith('#')])

(90% because it still needs an extra step to trim whitespace from the key and value names but I don't remember off-hand how to cram that into the same line.)

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