> This was not code written to be approachable by any other random team member without further context, it was written for a different purpose entirely.
Ah, let me quote: "Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute." – Hal Abelson
And I believe he is right. If you don't write your programs for other people to read, then they not worth being written in that way. Always consider that next person, who needs to read and understand your code. If you don't, then you are not much of a great team player at all. It's great you can do some brain acrobatics, but not much use, if the only one on team being able to understand your code is yourself. I don't know how many 1 person software developer jobs there are still out there, but I guess the number is vanishingly small, compared to team jobs. I would not want someone in my team, who does not pay attention to keeping things very readable.
> Perhaps people would be less reluctant to show their code in public if it were not so often criticised for falling short of some criteria that the author was never intending to meet?
True, you got a point here. But do we want this display of code? However, personally, I'd probably not miss reading such code and maybe it would even be good for the entire profession of software development, if such code was not displayed as something to be achieved but rather something to be shunned.
It’s not a piece of software worked on by a team though. It’s a personal project, written to by one person to be understood by that person, and incidentally I think some effort has been made to make the code easier to read for random passers-by on the internet. Not every piece of code has to be written to meet the same goals, there is a large spectrum.
I write both terse notes to myself, and longer more well-thought out sets of notes to distribute to undergraduates in classes I teach. I wouldn’t give the undergraduates my personal notes - they are simply too unpolished and terse - but my colleagues find them very helpful on occasion. Is it wrong to have two different ways of writing?
I would say this C implementation leans somewhere between “note to self” and “arty exploration”. Is it worth being written? I don’t think you or I could be the judge of that, but the author obviously thought so. Live and let live.
Your amount of unwillingness to learn and understand is disturbing. Lowest-common-denominator dumbing-down is not how we advance our craft. There are many others who can understand it, perhaps you should ask yourself why you can't.
If you think this is unreadable, then you are not qualified to read it --- yet. I implore you to try; maybe it will actually be enlightening.
Nice, now we are getting personal! Interesting, how much you know about me from just a comment. And still you miss the simplest of points, which there are: meaningful variable names, meaningful procedure names, explaining comments.
Perhaps it is not as much that "I can't" because of incapability or stupidity, but simply, that I wont, because of the lack of care given to creating something meeting minimal standards for modern software development and best practices.
Yes, that's all too familiar to me. The dogmatic cargo-culting buzzword-bingo "religion" whose only claim to fame is in effectively producing gargantuan Enterprise Quality™ software --- I mean solutions --- which everyone inevitably hates because they are ridiculously bloated and overengineered to the point that the simplest things take an absurd amount of time and energy, and also have abysmal UX too...
Ah, let me quote: "Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute." – Hal Abelson
And I believe he is right. If you don't write your programs for other people to read, then they not worth being written in that way. Always consider that next person, who needs to read and understand your code. If you don't, then you are not much of a great team player at all. It's great you can do some brain acrobatics, but not much use, if the only one on team being able to understand your code is yourself. I don't know how many 1 person software developer jobs there are still out there, but I guess the number is vanishingly small, compared to team jobs. I would not want someone in my team, who does not pay attention to keeping things very readable.
> Perhaps people would be less reluctant to show their code in public if it were not so often criticised for falling short of some criteria that the author was never intending to meet?
True, you got a point here. But do we want this display of code? However, personally, I'd probably not miss reading such code and maybe it would even be good for the entire profession of software development, if such code was not displayed as something to be achieved but rather something to be shunned.