## ken pugh ### communications of the ACM, vol 55, april 2012
summary
a reaction to the Coding Guidelines article by Green and Ledgard arguing that there are different levels of aesthetics, that they treat of surface level ones while leaving aside semantic ones.
disappointed by the highlight on the “alignment, naming, use of white space, use of context, syntax highlighting, and IDE choice” by Green and Ledgard in Coding Guidelines.
“there is a more compelling beauty in the deeper semantic properties of code than layout and naming” > abstraction > balancing precision and generality > elegant structure of class hierarchy > balance between breadth and depth > order of parameter lists > leverage library code with minimal effort
formalizing such semantic properties is more difficult than coding conventions
ralph waldo emerson: “we ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has no superfluous patterns; which exactly answers its ends; which stands related to all things; which is the means to many extremes”.
in the same column, a discussion of the C one-liner:
while (*s++ = *t++)
translated into assembly:
A mov (@R0)++,(@R1)++
bne A
which was beautiful and elegant as it was running in the PDP-11 at the time, but the condition that enabled it (having null-terminated strings) makes it a lot harder to write C code today.
why do we compute?
Richard Hamming, Bell Labs: “we compute because we want to know and understand”