On Fri, Feb 22, 2008 at 02:20:12PM -0500, Jeff Garzik wrote: > Ingo Molnar wrote: >> 2) you might know that Deja-Vu moment when you look at a new patch that >> has been submitted to lkml and you have a strange, weird "feeling" >> that there's something wrong about the patch. >> It's totally subconscious, and you take a closer look and a few >> seconds later you find a real bug in the code. >> That "feeling" i believe comes from a fundamental property of how >> human vision is connected to the human brain: pattern matching. Really >> good programmers have built a "library" of patterns of "good" and >> "bad" looking coding practices. >> If a patch or if a file has a clean _style_, bugs and deeper >> structural problems often stand out like a sore thumb. But if the > [...] > >> The best programmers are the ones who have a good eye for details - >> and that subconsciously extends to "style details" too. I've yet to >> see a _single_ example of a good, experienced kernel programmer who >> writes code that looks absolutely careless and sloppy, but which is >> top-notch otherwise. (Newbies will make style mistakes a lot more >> often - and for them checkpatch is a nice and easy experience at >> reading other people's code and trying to learn the style of the >> kernel.) > [...] > >> 4) there's a psychological effect as well: clean _looking_ code is >> more attractive to coders to improve upon. Once the code _looks_ clean >> (mechanically), the people with the real structural cleanups are not >> far away either. Code that just looks nice is simply more of a >> pleasure to work with and to improve, so there's a strong >> psychological relationship between the "small, seemingly unimportant >> details" cleanups and the real, structural cleanups. > > The above deserved to be quoted... just because I agree with all of it so > strongly :) > > Bugs really do "hide" in ugly code, in part because my brain has been > optimized to review clean code. > > Like everything else in life, one must strike a balance between picking > style nits with someone's patch, and making honest criticisms of a patch > because said patch is too "unclean" to be reviewed by anyone.
I totally agree with all of this. checkpatch.pl is a useful tool to use, and is quite handy for helping the kernel code for all of the above reasons. </aol> thanks, greg k-h -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
