Friday, March 30, 2007

Code, Reports, and Presentations

Recently, I joined a new company and have spent the last month reading various documents, reports, viewing presentations and reading a lot of C code.

One of the good things here is that the presentations are not mere ppts, but you see and hear a person lecturing you live. Some of the presentations were beautiful, some were what my professor used to call "reading from the slides".

The thing that is irritating me right now is the code I have been trying to understand for last 5 days. Very mildly put, the code is shitty. Some functions are as long as 2000 lines. Occassionally, you come across a function which is 700 lines in length. If that is not enough of a torture, 7 streams of functionality are using the same set of functions. As a result, the readability of code, I should say, is missing altogether.

I sometimes wonder, what do all the coding standards in an IT industry achieve, if the code that is getting written and checked-in, is not readable at all? And by readability, what I mean is ease of understanding for a person who knows the concepts and is new to the code. Mere indentation and how to use braces; should not be the only parameters of coding standards.

During my stay at IIT Bombay, the following links really helped me. I do not claim I am a perfect coder, or a great orator or presenter, but these have definitely helped me. You can also try them - no harm.
  1. http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/~ranade/coding.html
  2. http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/~ranade/sundar.txt

1 comment:

Aditya Kulkarni said...

This link gives some insights into how shitty code comes into existence. Interesting read.