Am I not seeing the Error?

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Tue, 13 Aug 2013 09:19:07 +0100, Joshua Landau wrote:

> On 12 August 2013 16:47, Roy Smith <roy at panix.com> wrote:
>> I can't quite sort out the multiple quoting levels, but somebody said:
>>
>>>>> Programming like that is called trolling. A programmer that uses
>>>>> trolling is called a troll. A troll can also refer to such a line of
>>>>> code itself. My scripts contain a lot of trolls. It is easier for me
>>>>> to read trolls than "typical" coding styles.
>>
>> Please tell me this is all just an elaborate joke.
> 
> That was the OP (Devyn Collier Johnson, <devyncjohnson at gmail.com>) and
> I, too, am hoping this is an elaborate joke. However, see
> "http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~devyncjohnson-d/neobot/trunk/view/head:/
lib/beta_engine".
> 
> I am struggling to see what the punchline is...


If Artificial Intelligence code is hard to write, it damn well should be 
hard to read too. Otherwise, how will people know how brilliant you are?

But seriously... I don't know what language Devyn is writing in Python, 
but I've seen code like that before. Mostly code written back in the 
early to mid 1980s. I may have even written some of it myself :-)

Anyway, I don't think we should badger Devyn, we're not his dad and we're 
not the code police. All we can do is continue to demonstrate good, 
idiomatic, *working* Python code, and hopefully he will learn to write 
the same.


-- 
Steven