It wouldn't be a Weekly Edition without a flame war over style [LWN.net]

It wouldn't be a Weekly Edition without a flame war over style

Posted Mar 27, 2008 6:24 UTC (Thu) by lysse (subscriber, #3190)
In reply to: It wouldn't be a Weekly Edition without a flame war over style by pr1268
Parent article: Quotes of the week

> I shudder to think of how much time and effort is spent on troubleshooting a kernel panic
where the developer has to wade through hundreds of lines of source trying to find matching
curly braces, an assignment operator where a == should have been, or (my personal favorite) a
stray semicolon at the end of a for( ) or while( ) loop (those are pure evil!).

Yes, I think we can all agree that C is the *very worst* language Linus could have chosen to
start coding Linux in - Modula-2 would have been *so* much better.

*ducks*

Seriously - if a stylistic convention isn't pissing everyone off equally, chances are it's
just a reflection of the preferences of the biggest bully in the room. For all of your
impassioned ranting that everyone must compromise or suffer in misery and torment, it's not at
all unreasonable to expect that one's acceptance into a community will cause some adjustment
in its conducts and practices - and nor is it unreasonable to leave that community as soon as
one discovers otherwise. If rules exist, they do so as boundaries for discussion and starting
points for development, not as decrees fixed for all time. That's just how communities *work*,
and programming teams are no different - or at any rate, they *shouldn't* be.

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It wouldn't be a Weekly Edition without a flame war over style

Posted Mar 27, 2008 7:36 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]

... unless there are millions of lines of code already written to one standard.  Choose one:
(a) new code matches it, (b) the millions of lines of old code are altered to match a new
style, or (c) you get a mishmash of different styles.  Nobody will do (b), and nobody wants
(c).  What's left?

It wouldn't be a Weekly Edition without a flame war over style

Posted Apr 3, 2008 3:40 UTC (Thu) by lysse (subscriber, #3190) [Link]

(c) happens anyway, despite everyone's best intentions. That's community too.