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by chii
2598 days ago
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> simple on it's surface but has an incredible amount of depth to it that's the definition of bad code: looks simple and innocuous. Does something completely out of the world and "unexpected" (from the point of view of a novice/unknowledgable programmer). |
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It's bad code that has to be bad, it has to be complex, it's inherently difficult and needs to tiptoe around edge cases and avoid pitfalls that 99% of us don't know or have to care about. And yet it's able to do that and still be small, concise, and relatively easy to understand on a basic level, even if you can't quite understand the full reasoning behind why it was created that way on the surface.
I have similar feelings about the fast square root function from Quake III. It's horrible and ugly and confusing on the surface, but incredibly powerful, fast, and humbling when you really look at it. And it served a purpose that enabled the game to work!