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Code Is Not Literature
An anonymous reader writes "Hacker and author Peter Seibel has done a lot of work to adopt one of the most widely-accepted practices toward becoming a better programmer: reading high quality code. He's set up code-reading groups and interviewed other programmers to see what code they read. But he's come to learn that the overwhelming majority of programmers don't practice what they preach. Why? He says, 'We don't read code, we decode it. We examine it. A piece of code is not literature; it is a specimen.' He relates an anecdote from Donald Knuth about figuring out a Fortran compiler, and indeed, it reads more like a 'scientific investigation' than the process we refer to as 'reading.' Seibel is now changing his code-reading group to account for this: 'So instead of trying to pick out a piece of code and reading it and then discussing it like a bunch of Comp Lit. grad students, I think a better model is for one of us to play the role of a 19th century naturalist returning from a trip to some exotic island to present to the local scientific society a discussion of the crazy beetles they found.'"
It's more about the metatextual narrative. What does this say about the author? This GOTO implies that the author does not want to be where he is. He is desperate to break out; to be anywhere other than where he is now. He's backed himself into this corner, bound in a loop of his own devising, and yet unable to meet the conditions necessary to move forward. "GOTO!" he cries out, "For the love of God, take me away from the endless DO and WHILE!"
Here we see laid out the mind of a soul utterly broken. Can you not feel his burning shame? From the time he first took his toddling steps into the Hello, World! his teachers have admonished him "GOTO statement considered harmful". Yet desperate times call for desperate measures. He casts the thread of his execution into the void*.
Where will he land? We scan the page with increasing alarm. Can you feel your heart quicken? Where is the label? Where are we GOing TO? Now the reader is caught up in the narrative as well as the author. Does the label exist at all? How did this thing ever compile? Until finally, we see it. Safe at last! Our execution can continue, and yet we are forever changed by the experience. Have we exited the loop in the correct condition? Will there be enduring side effects? Read on to find out...
* The void, that is, not a pointer to an unknown type, I just mean to clarify that as a footnote**.
** A footnote, that is, not a pointer to a pointer to a footnote.
Reading other people's code is a great way to learn better ways of doing things you thought you already knew how to do. ;)
The GOTO statement is reflective of the existential malaise experienced by programmers, and typified in post-modern society.
It shows that the programmer in the code, as in life, feels they have reached a dead-end from which there is no escape, and reflective of a desire to escape the mundane and return to the optimism of youth.
The GOTO becomes a metaphor for man's desire for a quick solution to our problems, and a naive belief we can make the problems go away, and thus becomes symbolic of wish-fulfillment and fantasy to offset the feelings of stagnation and dread so often described in post-modernism.
In stack based languages, the GOTO becomes a surrogate for a strong father figure, and metaphorically kills the mother in frustration. It's also convenient for breaking out of nested logic to an error handler, which gives us feelings of going back to the womb, and indulging in self-infantilism in order to achieve a more expedient resolution of the dichotomy between self and other.
Thematically, the GOTO is both liberation, and the source of our own slavery; it simultaneously demonstrates our desire for freedom, as well as showing the futility of such a quest and how we re-enslave ourselves through our actions.
Because it highlights the existential question of "how do you implement an IF statement without a GOTO in Assembler?", it forces us to acknowledge that, as much as man tries to escape his primitive roots, there persist behavior which is neither rational nor defensible, but which we nonetheless cannot do without from an evolutionary perspective.
The GOTO defines for us the boundary between man as thinking entity, and non-thinking animal. And, as in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, forces us to look within ourselves, and confront the things we see but cannot fully understand or control.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.