Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 22 Feb 2008 14:20:12 -0500 | From | Jeff Garzik <> | Subject | Re: Merging of completely unreviewed drivers |
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Ingo Molnar wrote: > 2) you might know that Deja-Vu moment when you look at a new patch that > has been submitted to lkml and you have a strange, weird "feeling" > that there's something wrong about the patch. > > It's totally subconscious, and you take a closer look and a few > seconds later you find a real bug in the code. > > That "feeling" i believe comes from a fundamental property of how > human vision is connected to the human brain: pattern matching. > Really good programmers have built a "library" of patterns of "good" > and "bad" looking coding practices. > > If a patch or if a file has a clean _style_, bugs and deeper > structural problems often stand out like a sore thumb. But if the [...]
> The best programmers are the ones who have a good eye for details - > and that subconsciously extends to "style details" too. I've yet to > see a _single_ example of a good, experienced kernel programmer who > writes code that looks absolutely careless and sloppy, but which is > top-notch otherwise. (Newbies will make style mistakes a lot more > often - and for them checkpatch is a nice and easy experience at > reading other people's code and trying to learn the style of the > kernel.) [...]
> 4) there's a psychological effect as well: clean _looking_ code is > more attractive to coders to improve upon. Once the code _looks_ > clean (mechanically), the people with the real structural cleanups > are not far away either. Code that just looks nice is simply more of > a pleasure to work with and to improve, so there's a strong > psychological relationship between the "small, seemingly unimportant > details" cleanups and the real, structural cleanups.
The above deserved to be quoted... just because I agree with all of it so strongly :)
Bugs really do "hide" in ugly code, in part because my brain has been optimized to review clean code.
Like everything else in life, one must strike a balance between picking style nits with someone's patch, and making honest criticisms of a patch because said patch is too "unclean" to be reviewed by anyone.
Jeff
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