
"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:
2005-11-16
Hi,
* they can be completely unreadable - even to many seasoned developers
* and they usually run slower then multiple, more precise, expressions.
The other problem is adequate error handling.
For me, adequate error handling means telling the user what was wrong with descriptive error messages; like "missing space between foo and bar", "bad character after foo", "bar needs to be at least 4 characters", etc.
With a single over-engineered regex the only error message you can do is "Something was wrong but this code is too stupid to tell you what"...
- Brendan