> There's a lot of people jumping on the bandwagon of down-voting anyone who dares to criticise the code
Please omit such offensive/defensive rhetoric from your posts to HN. It adds no information and is bad for conversation.
The problem here isn't "daring" to criticize, it's rejecting the unfamiliar. This is like traveling to a new country and complaining because they cook everything wrong and say everything wrong. Unfamiliarity is relative—it's not a property of the thing you're reacting to. Same with readability: it's relative to the reader.
In some contexts this is obvious. If you don't know German, you wouldn't reject a German text as unreadable or poorly written. But in other contexts, when we unconsciously assume or were taught that there's only one valid way to do something, we react with shock and distaste at work that violates known conventions. Such work may in fact be organized around different conventions for reasons we don't yet see. Good conversation across such boundaries requires a bit of distance from our own assumptions.
Programming is like the world of art this way. There are countless examples in art history of sharp departures from convention provoking shock and distaste, and people saying things like "There's a reason why readable and beautiful [art] is favoured". Riot police famously had to be called to the early shows of the Impressionists, yet the beauty of their paintings is obvious to us now.
> This is like traveling to a new country and complaining because they cook everything wrong and say everything wrong.
> If you don't know German
> Programming is like the world of art
Sorry if that offended you, it wasn't my intention; I tried to keep my comment fair to both sides.
Let me however just say that what you're doing in your reply is attacking the straw man. You're setting up a version of my argument and then attacking that, instead of responding to my argument directly.
I'll respond to your comment anyways. Code is art, just as you alluded to in your response. And from a solely artistic point of view, there's a certain glee and wonder at seeing short and smart code. When I browse codegolf on SE, I never fail to be amazed at the frankly fucking brilliant solutions some people come up with.
Having said that, my main point was that code like that, in my opinion, does not belong in a proper project. I get the point of it being practical for a single person, but that codebase is above and beyond what is reasonable. It's simply not nice code.
You're saying that I should not think that the code is not nice because I don't understand it, but you seem to be missing the main point in your flowery metaphors and analogies of art: art is subjective. You might find that code to be beautiful in its own way, and I'm sure that's justified to you, but I do not.
Please omit such offensive/defensive rhetoric from your posts to HN. It adds no information and is bad for conversation.
The problem here isn't "daring" to criticize, it's rejecting the unfamiliar. This is like traveling to a new country and complaining because they cook everything wrong and say everything wrong. Unfamiliarity is relative—it's not a property of the thing you're reacting to. Same with readability: it's relative to the reader.
In some contexts this is obvious. If you don't know German, you wouldn't reject a German text as unreadable or poorly written. But in other contexts, when we unconsciously assume or were taught that there's only one valid way to do something, we react with shock and distaste at work that violates known conventions. Such work may in fact be organized around different conventions for reasons we don't yet see. Good conversation across such boundaries requires a bit of distance from our own assumptions.
Programming is like the world of art this way. There are countless examples in art history of sharp departures from convention provoking shock and distaste, and people saying things like "There's a reason why readable and beautiful [art] is favoured". Riot police famously had to be called to the early shows of the Impressionists, yet the beauty of their paintings is obvious to us now.