No comments.

There are no comments on this blog. The original reason for that was that I didn't want to deal with moderation. But another reason has grown, and grown, and grown: I see comments elsewhere and I want no part of that.

Christopher Seiwald once wrote an essay called Seven Pillars of Pretty Code, where he argues that how code looks correlates with how it works. (Later, Laura Wingerd and he updated the argument in Code in Motion, where they argue that deep or jumpy indentation is practically the same as too-complex logic, which is practically the same as buggy code.)

Compare the reading experience from the link above to the same thing in a blog posting with comments. I see about fifty comments. One from a lisper who thinks Christopher's C looks awful (to my eyes, it looks like high-level assembler) and therefore Christopher is wrong. Several who think one of Christopher's functions is much too long (there is even a good reason to think so, but none of the commenters seem aware of that reason, they're just repeating a rule of thumb they've learned). There's one commenter who thinks using /* */ for comments in C is wrong, and therefore Christopher is wrong. And so on.

Most seem to to be written after about ten seconds' reflection, by people who cannot tell the difference between their own opinions and the laws of thermodynamics. The outpourings of their souls make it difficult for me to concentrate on the essay itself.

I notice there's a chrome extension to restore one's faith in humanity. Must try that out.