Please do not attempt to simplify this code

Re:Please do not attempt to simplify this code by szemet on Friday December 28, 2018 @07:39AM (#18776412)

I have read an extreme counter-opinion in some J or APL article. It said that it is a bad pactice to name small and common functions:

The example was maybe the average function - and the reasoning was, if I recall correctly:

1. The defintion is shorter then the name average ;)

2. Every praticioning programmer will recognise the definition as a common idiom

3. From the definition it is immediately clear how corner cases are handled (e.g. zero length array)

I just leave this here as an example to show, that programming communities/cultures exists with completely different/alien? ideas about what clean code is ;)

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Re:Please do not attempt to simplify this code by AstralStorm on Friday December 28, 2018 @09:08AM (#18776759)

Allegedly. And then you suddenly want to write a SIMD version of an average or optimize it... Mass search and replace time? That'd bloat the code a lot.

Common repeated well defined and mostly immutable code is best left as functions. This is why for example in C strcmp exists instead of everyone writing a two-liner - and the specialized variant gives big performance gains.

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Re:Please do not attempt to simplify this code by szemet on Friday December 28, 2018 @11:45AM (#18777809)

I've got your point.

Just for the sake of nitpicking: both your actual examples have been solved by compilers automatically.

SIMD/AVX: https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Guides/AVX

JVM generates vectorized string instructions from your simple for cycles - if availabe: http://jcdav.is/2016/09/01/How-the-JVM-compares-your-strings...

edit: my second example link is maybe wrong, but anyway, auto-vectorization is a real thing...

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