Re: Merging of completely unreviewed drivers

From: Jeff Garzik
Date: Fri Feb 22 2008 - 14:20:55 EST


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.

Jeff



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