Re:How to program a text adventure in C (2016)
by emily-c on Sunday March 22, 2020 @01:44PM
(#22656847)
Most legacy code is this way unfortunately. The actual techniques employed by the "called out" code are not uncommon. I don't think that people are defending the lack of clarity but rather what the code is doing itself. It could be written more clearly, though one could argue that the lengthy series of articles does just that. Maybe it's an exercise for you to write it how you want.
Have you taken a look at some major C codebases? It's not justification but an appeal to authority seems pretty unnecessary :)
Re:How to program a text adventure in C (2016)
by jstimpfle on Sunday March 22, 2020 @01:43PM
(#22656836)
If you mean me, you're right in that I've been working with C in varying capacity for just about 10 years (Not that I believe that "years" is a good unit to measure experience). On the other hand, I miss from your comment what exactly is wrong with my argumentation, and I feel that the arrogant comment is not mine but yours (assuming you have 20 years or more).
There are phases programmers go through. One phase occurs about after 10 years of professional programming. I call this the "no mercy" phase, where these newly-minted senior programmers think defensive programming is for noobs, and scrunch their C code down to the fewest number of lines and characters. And when someone objects, the reply is, paraphrased (as seen in the replies): "You're just not as good a programmer as me." Sadly, it takes another 10 years for this arrogance to dissipate.