You don't want to completely seal the ear canal. You create an area of much higher humidity and can get a nasty wax buildup ("what, I can't hear you - I've got this nasty wax build-up in my ear").
Besides, if hearing is your main truck avoidance mechanism, you've got other problems.
People have been killed by trains because their walkmans (yes - it was happening even back then) were too loud. That's why some places have banned the use of ANY earphone-equipped music player when driving a car or riding a bicycle. And when you're driving, hearing is an important part of your awareness - not only for that "slightly odd mechanical noise" that might signal trouble down the road, but also such things as the noise-generating grooves along the right shoulder to warn people that they're straying off the road (or to wake them up if they're drowsing off), and the sound of the motorcycle or car that just pulled into your blind spot.
It would be great to create a silent zone of about 1000 ft around my house so the little rich white gansta wannabes can stop blasting their shit as they drive by at all hours of the night.
Let's add all the idiots who think it's okay to run a circular saw first thing Sunday morning because they don't know that Sunday most of us like to sleep in. And while we're at it, muzzle those stupid church bells. And a force field that crushes Jehovahs Witnesses into little blobs of degenerate matter when they ring your doorbell would be a nice addition.
Sometimes cubicles are good - you can hear a co-worker is in trouble (they're cursing at the same file over and over) and help; other times, it's awful - to the point where I had to grab my laptop and go outside in the parking lot and sit in my car to work out a tricky algorithm.
Management doesn't have a clue - cubicles are not a natural work environment. Neither are desks. Table tops - with LOTS of space for all sorts of stuff AND stretch your legs under, or adopt an alternate seating position, lots of extra shelving hanging around, and quiet areas where you can go to work out details - or just close your eyes and THINK!
Ad while we're at it - dual monitors as a minimum. Anything less is a waste of resources, and also bad for your health (since you're always looking at the same screen, with your body unnaturally held in the same position). I simply refuse to work with less than 2 screens, even if I have to buy them myself.
First, we're not all clones, we don't have to agree with *everything* Stallman says.
Second, depending on how you look at it, he's right. If you're properly rewarded (compensated) for the creation of your program, what right do you have to impose additional restrictions on me, the end user? Should you be paid a second time when my old box dies and I move the bits onto another box? I've already paid an amount that both sides originally agreed was fair and equitable.
There's *no* perfect answer - and developing proprietary software put the food on my table, so I'm obviously in agreement with you that there's nothing inherently wrong with proprietary software. I just think it's not the best model - open works better, and is better for (almost) everyone in the long run.
It's like the current copyright mess in videos and movies - copyright terms were wayyyyy over-extended.
I get the idea that some of you would throw me in prison for developing non-GPLed software.
Absolutely not. But there's a big difference between open and closed, and whoring for Microsoft as blatantly as Miguel has done (and not realizing that the whole c# thing is just another trojan horse, as is.NET, as is silverlight) gets to the point where he should just either go work for them, or one of their partners.
by his own account, he refused to get back in the car when ordered to. Cops with guns vs. arrogant Canuck prick with frozen brain == predictable outcome.
Too much silence if even more distracting for some people, myself included.
That depends on how used to silence you are, silence being a rarity today.
So what we need to do is
get rid of cubicle farms.
give people doors to their offices
have management get a clue as to how to measure performance, rather than thinking "warm body sitting in chair that I can see" when I walk around the office
Then again, if they were able to implement #3, most of us could work from home, saving fuel, energy, office space, time, our sanity...
iTwire says its because of article by de Icaza that resulted into Stallman protesting and the whole shit hitting the fan.
Miguel should just go and work for Microsoft.
Although Moonlight has supported this mode of operation since day one, turning this into a standard way to develop applications was going to take a long time. We would have needed to port Moonlight to Windows and OSX and then we would have to bootstrap the ecosystem of "Silverlight+" applications.
But having Microsoft stand behind this new model will open the gates to a whole new class of desktop applications for the desktop. The ones that I was dreaming about just two weeks ago.
This was a big surprise for everyone. For years folks have been asking Microsoft to give Silverlight this capability to build desktop apps and to compete with Air and it is now finally here. This is a case of doing the right thing for users and developers.
RMS is 100% right on this one. Again.
Then again, Gnome has always been an ugly desktop.
Nothing runs on poutine. Try this: Eat a bunch of it and try running
Nonsense - real poutine is made with french fries fried in oil with at least 100,000 km on it - you WILL have the runs after eating enough of it...
Seriously, poutine made with fries done in new oil, cooked properly (fry them, take them out, drain, refry so the outside is crip and the inside is cooked), top with curd cheese and poutine sauce is awesome. The only thing better is Italian poutine - poutine with a thick and meaty spaghetti sauce. It does for french fries what a Michigan Hotdog does for "tube steak."
Spice it up with pepper rings and/or crushed chillies. Eat.
Problem is, you stop doing tech, you start to become obsolete, so as soon as you move to management, you start the "best-before due date" clock.
With the accelerating pace of change, a few years out and you'll never be able to get back in - and you'll be obsolete at managing the next big thing...
there's a reason why so many old farts ^W^W people write "you can have my keyboard when you pry it from my cold dead hands".
start using those can't-really-sleep-can't-really-go-anywhere-can't-drink hours
Since when can't management drink - even on the job? What do you think those "business lunches" and "conventions" and "conferences" are for? Booze and swag.
And you can have the privilege of paying $50,000 to make that argument in open court. $50,000 that the 22-year-old probably doesn't have.
don't be an idiot. I've already posted all the info needed on how to tell the FBI and the DA to go f*** themselves, from the fact that title 18 section 2252 is clear that's all he needs to do, to the fact that he doesn't hve to prove he's innocent, and that they have to prove intent beyond a reasonable doubt which they can't do. Also, any attempt to describe how they ressurrected the file will prove his innocence, since he obviously then complied with art 2252 by deleting it in the first place.
His public defender is incompetent - they didn't even bother reading the law, and bought the DA's story hook, line and sinker.
If he fires his lawyer and gets some help from a friend to file the right motions, the case will be dropped, or they'll lose. Cost to him either way is under $100.
It's a familiar pattern that the brain can process much more quickly and correctly.
... only because that's all you've experienced. I have no problem parsing code that removes all superfluous braces around one-line statements, or for that matter, the classical empty for(); statement that does all the work inside the for() statement, so you terminate it with a semicolon, rather than what you would do - put some empty braces. The braces are only required for multi-line blocks in the language standard. If you can't read code that conforms to the standard, then you have the problem, not me.
I guess you need to learn to be more fluent in the language. Next, you'll say that the comma operator should be banned because YOU might make a mistake in interpreting how it works. Or the hook operator. Or *gasp* those evil macros. And you'll also insist that we use that piece of shit called the stl when we're trying to make a multi-threaded app, and then wonder why performance is absolute crap.
Good fucking God. Because humans aren't "folding editors"!!!!!
Really? Next you'll say you can't read the first line of a paragraph, then skip to the next paragraph if you realize that what you're not looking at the right code. Do you move your lips when you read?
Look, if YOU have a problem with concise code, that's your problem. Your style went out back in the early '90s. It's still taught that way because teachers are inevitably a decade behind the curve - at the minimum. Only old farts who can't adapt, the people who learned from them, people who are trying to increase their LOC count, and old koreans still put the opening brace on its' own line, or are so "un-fluent" in the language that they need to blockify everything, and can't handle something as simple as an if() without braces. What next - putting braces around the contents of case statements "just in case"? I've seen people do crap that, and it tells me one thing - they don't really know c. For them, pascal is probably a better option, since you HAVE to put begin and end...
Visual conciseness isn't a question of saving disk space - it's a question of making the code easier to read by reducing clutter. It works - problem is, you're so used to the crutch (yes, all those superfluous braces that the standard says aren't required ARE a crutch) of the clutter that you can't do without it. You're a crip. Admitting it is the first step in overcoming your handicap.
And proper indentation would have saved the day - no braces required.
It's one thing python actually gets right.
And your example just shows that a lot of people can't read code. If you're not dependent on braces to "clue you in", you'll spot the error immediately.
Also, you NEVER should use tabs instead of spaces for indentation. What happens if someone happens to use an editor that expands tabs to something different so that code no longer lines up?
That's a problem with YOUR editor, not mine. there's a TAB key on your keyboard for a reason.
One of the reasons people try to use 4 spaces instead of an 8-space tab is because they let their code get fugly - WAY too many levels of indent and way too long variable names - and the only way they can see it on-screen without resorting to havig their code wrap every second line is to cheat - to only indent 4 spaces instead of a hard tab.
They're too unimaginative to come up with concise descriptive variable, function, class, and method names, and to stupid to realize that when your code has too many levels of nesting, it's "broken by design" and a great place for bugs to breed..
You always use the same editor? With nice, controllable GUI interfaces?
Well, then you're nobody.
Because until you're the guy on call who has to be able to fix things over a satellite link with 500 ms RTT and no bandwidth, you won't know why you have to write code so it's consistent no matter what editor you view it in.
Arrogant little piss-ant, aren't we? I'm quite comfortable using vim on a remote box via ssh. I was writing code before the terms tui and gui were even in common use - we only had text screens. We had to code by pushing the bytes uphill, both ways, in a storm (well, not quite that bad, but monochrome amber monitors and hercules video cards give you an idea?). And in your example of "no bandwidth", a hard tab is better, since it's only 1 character. So who's the nobody? According to your definition, you failed since you sure wasted bandwidth. Like your examples - but at least you're consistent in that respect.
They don't allow that because people who say stupid things will go back and edit them later to say that they didn't. They could keep histories like they do in Wikis, but that would add a lot of overhead because so many people say so many stupid things on Slashdot (and I'm guilty of that too), but I can certainly see why you would want that capability:
Other systems put <strike> tags around the original text you want to change - which is the original purpose of strike-through text, btw. Also, if even THAT is too much, there's no extra "overhead" in doing an "append-only" to the original post, so it makes it clear what was the original and what was added. I'm sure you've seen lots of sites that do that - even big news organizations, where they'll have update or correction appended to the original text. Put the update, along with the timestamp; eg
update 2010:02:30We've added a new day to the calendar- February 30th!.
There is NO excuse for not adding at least an "append-to-original-text" mode for the quick fixes, or for adding additional citations, etc., rather than have the citations duplicated in multiple responses. Ditto for corrections. The only down side is it would cut down on page views and allow for fewer flame wars, so fewer ads shown.
There are some things that are just so common and obvius that "proper typecasing" is a waste of time. For example, cdate, mdate, adate (creation, modification, and access dates), uid, gid (user ID, group ID), umask, ibuff, obuff (input and output buffers), tz, recno, rval. cDate, mDate, aDate, uId/uID, gId/ gID, uMask, iBuff, oBuff, tZ, recNo and rVal are just visual pollution.
Okay, those are horror stories - and I can believe the "create multiple directories" one - and not just with directory creation. What's really bad if it doesn't create all the directories, doesn't notice, tries to change to the new directories, then goes on to create its' temp files... and delete every file in the directory when done.
No, it wasn't me, but it could have been. Sometimes you're just too rushed to check everything.
The implementation details should be hidden in the function call. This way, risk() is free to either check a variable to see if the value has already been calculated, or do the calculation itself.
Example (sorry for the non-tabbed formatting):
risk() {
current_risk != NULL ? current_risk : calcCurrentRisk();
}
This also lets you have other parts of the code invalidate current_risk, so the next time you call it, it updates the value. Doing the calculation every time can be a waste of time.
When I'm really stuck for an expressive variable or object or function or method name, I break out the thesaurus. I'd rather spend 10 minutes really thinking about what I'm trying to do, and get the right name, than pick the wrong one and have to "remember" that it's not exactly what it implies.
Java is always interpreted - sure, at runtime, it does "just-in-time" compiling and caching of byte-code - but it has to INTERPRET that first. You can't keep the cache between program runs, for security reasons.
The only exception is native code - which isn't java.
The relevance to the article is that the article complains about how the code is wrong, but it looks fine to me, and I've been using c for decades. If you look at his "reference" section, you'll see he cites java style. Also, the idea that the stl is a solution is ludicrous in a c program. Ain't no such animal. And his example of a method name is also wrong, because (1) c doesn't have class methods, just functions (you can embed a pointer to a function in a struct, but it's not a "method"), and (2) you should be able, in a c++ program, to use the shorter method name because you get the context from the class name. That's the idea behind polymorthism - Man.paint() probably isn't the same as House.paint(). PolicyHolder.risk() isn't the same as CrossStreetBlindfolded.risk() isn't the same as RussianRoulette.risk(). You don't need to write PolicyHolder.riskOfPolicyHolderPayout(), CrossStreetBlindfolded.riskOfGetingHitByCarWhileCrossingStreetBlindfolded(), or RussianRoulette.riskPlayingRussianRoulette().
Java programmers should not criticize c programmers unless they're ready to get some serious pushback, that's all I'm saying. There are a lot of things that are done a certain way in c for a reason. Conventions have developed over the last few decades, and c system code doesn't look at all like c++ application code. You can safely assume a certain level of expertise in system code - if the person doesn't have it, it'll be apparent quickly because nothing they do will work.
It's like the engineering professor who proposed that the best test of their teaching ability would be to have the teachers take a ride in airplanes that their students designed. "That's no fair!!!" So finally, one of them asked "Would YOU get in a plane designed by one of your students?" "Of course. It would be the safest flight in the world - it would never get off the ground."
It's not cryptic to confound others - that's just a side effect, but it does raise the bar, which is a good thing.
I look at the language standard. Look at the if() statement. It is followed by one line, and a semicolon. No parenthesis. Parenthesis allow you to group multiple lines (blockify) - and its' always possible to replace any block of code with a one-liner (either a function call, a macro, or even using the comma operator).
Indent your code properly and you'll never have a problem with parenthesis - and your code will be more concise, thus easier to read.
Adding brackets increases the visual pollution, and I really hate it when people put the opening brace on its own line - its a waste of a line. Folding editors can handle braces at the end of the line just fine - why can't people? Concise can be clear as well.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't want to completely seal the ear canal. You create an area of much higher humidity and can get a nasty wax buildup ("what, I can't hear you - I've got this nasty wax build-up in my ear").
People have been killed by trains because their walkmans (yes - it was happening even back then) were too loud. That's why some places have banned the use of ANY earphone-equipped music player when driving a car or riding a bicycle. And when you're driving, hearing is an important part of your awareness - not only for that "slightly odd mechanical noise" that might signal trouble down the road, but also such things as the noise-generating grooves along the right shoulder to warn people that they're straying off the road (or to wake them up if they're drowsing off), and the sound of the motorcycle or car that just pulled into your blind spot.
Let's add all the idiots who think it's okay to run a circular saw first thing Sunday morning because they don't know that Sunday most of us like to sleep in. And while we're at it, muzzle those stupid church bells. And a force field that crushes Jehovahs Witnesses into little blobs of degenerate matter when they ring your doorbell would be a nice addition.
Sometimes cubicles are good - you can hear a co-worker is in trouble (they're cursing at the same file over and over) and help; other times, it's awful - to the point where I had to grab my laptop and go outside in the parking lot and sit in my car to work out a tricky algorithm.
Management doesn't have a clue - cubicles are not a natural work environment. Neither are desks. Table tops - with LOTS of space for all sorts of stuff AND stretch your legs under, or adopt an alternate seating position, lots of extra shelving hanging around, and quiet areas where you can go to work out details - or just close your eyes and THINK!
Ad while we're at it - dual monitors as a minimum. Anything less is a waste of resources, and also bad for your health (since you're always looking at the same screen, with your body unnaturally held in the same position). I simply refuse to work with less than 2 screens, even if I have to buy them myself.
First, we're not all clones, we don't have to agree with *everything* Stallman says.
Second, depending on how you look at it, he's right. If you're properly rewarded (compensated) for the creation of your program, what right do you have to impose additional restrictions on me, the end user? Should you be paid a second time when my old box dies and I move the bits onto another box? I've already paid an amount that both sides originally agreed was fair and equitable.
There's *no* perfect answer - and developing proprietary software put the food on my table, so I'm obviously in agreement with you that there's nothing inherently wrong with proprietary software. I just think it's not the best model - open works better, and is better for (almost) everyone in the long run.
It's like the current copyright mess in videos and movies - copyright terms were wayyyyy over-extended.
Absolutely not. But there's a big difference between open and closed, and whoring for Microsoft as blatantly as Miguel has done (and not realizing that the whole c# thing is just another trojan horse, as is .NET, as is silverlight) gets to the point where he should just either go work for them, or one of their partners.
http://trolltalk.com/blog/blog/article.php?story=20091212120550767
by his own account, he refused to get back in the car when ordered to. Cops with guns vs. arrogant Canuck prick with frozen brain == predictable outcome.
So what we need to do is
Then again, if they were able to implement #3, most of us could work from home, saving fuel, energy, office space, time, our sanity ...
Miguel should just go and work for Microsoft.
RMS is 100% right on this one. Again.
Then again, Gnome has always been an ugly desktop.
Keep registering accounts until it overflows - you'll then have the lowest number possible ... $MAX_NEGATIVE_VALUE.
The best I've ever had was a restaurant on the south shore (right on route 132 in Delson), but you can get it at a lot of places.
The trick, of course, is to know WHEN to go, because the quality can be variable at any place, depending on the cook.
Nonsense - real poutine is made with french fries fried in oil with at least 100,000 km on it - you WILL have the runs after eating enough of it ...
Seriously, poutine made with fries done in new oil, cooked properly (fry them, take them out, drain, refry so the outside is crip and the inside is cooked), top with curd cheese and poutine sauce is awesome. The only thing better is Italian poutine - poutine with a thick and meaty spaghetti sauce. It does for french fries what a Michigan Hotdog does for "tube steak."
Spice it up with pepper rings and/or crushed chillies. Eat.
Dumb mods never heard of The Forbin Project or the super-computer called Colossus
Problem is, you stop doing tech, you start to become obsolete, so as soon as you move to management, you start the "best-before due date" clock.
With the accelerating pace of change, a few years out and you'll never be able to get back in - and you'll be obsolete at managing the next big thing ...
there's a reason why so many old farts ^W^W people write "you can have my keyboard when you pry it from my cold dead hands".
Since when can't management drink - even on the job? What do you think those "business lunches" and "conventions" and "conferences" are for? Booze and swag.
don't be an idiot. I've already posted all the info needed on how to tell the FBI and the DA to go f*** themselves, from the fact that title 18 section 2252 is clear that's all he needs to do, to the fact that he doesn't hve to prove he's innocent, and that they have to prove intent beyond a reasonable doubt which they can't do. Also, any attempt to describe how they ressurrected the file will prove his innocence, since he obviously then complied with art 2252 by deleting it in the first place.
His public defender is incompetent - they didn't even bother reading the law, and bought the DA's story hook, line and sinker.
If he fires his lawyer and gets some help from a friend to file the right motions, the case will be dropped, or they'll lose. Cost to him either way is under $100.
I guess you need to learn to be more fluent in the language. Next, you'll say that the comma operator should be banned because YOU might make a mistake in interpreting how it works. Or the hook operator. Or *gasp* those evil macros. And you'll also insist that we use that piece of shit called the stl when we're trying to make a multi-threaded app, and then wonder why performance is absolute crap.
Really? Next you'll say you can't read the first line of a paragraph, then skip to the next paragraph if you realize that what you're not looking at the right code. Do you move your lips when you read?
Look, if YOU have a problem with concise code, that's your problem. Your style went out back in the early '90s. It's still taught that way because teachers are inevitably a decade behind the curve - at the minimum. Only old farts who can't adapt, the people who learned from them, people who are trying to increase their LOC count, and old koreans still put the opening brace on its' own line, or are so "un-fluent" in the language that they need to blockify everything, and can't handle something as simple as an if() without braces. What next - putting braces around the contents of case statements "just in case"? I've seen people do crap that, and it tells me one thing - they don't really know c. For them, pascal is probably a better option, since you HAVE to put begin and end ...
Visual conciseness isn't a question of saving disk space - it's a question of making the code easier to read by reducing clutter. It works - problem is, you're so used to the crutch (yes, all those superfluous braces that the standard says aren't required ARE a crutch) of the clutter that you can't do without it. You're a crip. Admitting it is the first step in overcoming your handicap.
And proper indentation would have saved the day - no braces required.
It's one thing python actually gets right.
And your example just shows that a lot of people can't read code. If you're not dependent on braces to "clue you in", you'll spot the error immediately.
That's a problem with YOUR editor, not mine. there's a TAB key on your keyboard for a reason.
One of the reasons people try to use 4 spaces instead of an 8-space tab is because they let their code get fugly - WAY too many levels of indent and way too long variable names - and the only way they can see it on-screen without resorting to havig their code wrap every second line is to cheat - to only indent 4 spaces instead of a hard tab.
They're too unimaginative to come up with concise descriptive variable, function, class, and method names, and to stupid to realize that when your code has too many levels of nesting, it's "broken by design" and a great place for bugs to breed..
Arrogant little piss-ant, aren't we? I'm quite comfortable using vim on a remote box via ssh. I was writing code before the terms tui and gui were even in common use - we only had text screens. We had to code by pushing the bytes uphill, both ways, in a storm (well, not quite that bad, but monochrome amber monitors and hercules video cards give you an idea?). And in your example of "no bandwidth", a hard tab is better, since it's only 1 character. So who's the nobody? According to your definition, you failed since you sure wasted bandwidth. Like your examples - but at least you're consistent in that respect.
1. The stl is totally inappropriate for ANY c program - it requires c++.
2. Sometimes you don't want the overhead of one of those generic one-size-fits-all solutions.
3. Are those libraries perfect? No? Well, gee, so when there's a bug, that's one more place it might have crawled in ...
4. Sometimes you want to take advantage of the extensions in c99.
Other systems put <strike> tags around the original text you want to change - which is the original purpose of strike-through text, btw. Also, if even THAT is too much, there's no extra "overhead" in doing an "append-only" to the original post, so it makes it clear what was the original and what was added. I'm sure you've seen lots of sites that do that - even big news organizations, where they'll have update or correction appended to the original text. Put the update, along with the timestamp; eg
update 2010:02:30 We've added a new day to the calendar- February 30th!.
There is NO excuse for not adding at least an "append-to-original-text" mode for the quick fixes, or for adding additional citations, etc., rather than have the citations duplicated in multiple responses. Ditto for corrections. The only down side is it would cut down on page views and allow for fewer flame wars, so fewer ads shown.
There are some things that are just so common and obvius that "proper typecasing" is a waste of time. For example, cdate, mdate, adate (creation, modification, and access dates), uid, gid (user ID, group ID), umask, ibuff, obuff (input and output buffers), tz, recno, rval. cDate, mDate, aDate, uId/uID, gId/ gID, uMask, iBuff, oBuff, tZ, recNo and rVal are just visual pollution.
Okay, those are horror stories - and I can believe the "create multiple directories" one - and not just with directory creation. What's really bad if it doesn't create all the directories, doesn't notice, tries to change to the new directories, then goes on to create its' temp files ... and delete every file in the directory when done.
No, it wasn't me, but it could have been. Sometimes you're just too rushed to check everything.
The implementation details should be hidden in the function call. This way, risk() is free to either check a variable to see if the value has already been calculated, or do the calculation itself.
Example (sorry for the non-tabbed formatting): risk() {
current_risk != NULL ? current_risk : calcCurrentRisk();
}
This also lets you have other parts of the code invalidate current_risk, so the next time you call it, it updates the value. Doing the calculation every time can be a waste of time.
When I'm really stuck for an expressive variable or object or function or method name, I break out the thesaurus. I'd rather spend 10 minutes really thinking about what I'm trying to do, and get the right name, than pick the wrong one and have to "remember" that it's not exactly what it implies.
Java is always interpreted - sure, at runtime, it does "just-in-time" compiling and caching of byte-code - but it has to INTERPRET that first. You can't keep the cache between program runs, for security reasons.
The only exception is native code - which isn't java.
The relevance to the article is that the article complains about how the code is wrong, but it looks fine to me, and I've been using c for decades. If you look at his "reference" section, you'll see he cites java style. Also, the idea that the stl is a solution is ludicrous in a c program. Ain't no such animal. And his example of a method name is also wrong, because (1) c doesn't have class methods, just functions (you can embed a pointer to a function in a struct, but it's not a "method"), and (2) you should be able, in a c++ program, to use the shorter method name because you get the context from the class name. That's the idea behind polymorthism - Man.paint() probably isn't the same as House.paint(). PolicyHolder.risk() isn't the same as CrossStreetBlindfolded.risk() isn't the same as RussianRoulette.risk(). You don't need to write PolicyHolder.riskOfPolicyHolderPayout(), CrossStreetBlindfolded.riskOfGetingHitByCarWhileCrossingStreetBlindfolded(), or RussianRoulette.riskPlayingRussianRoulette().
Java programmers should not criticize c programmers unless they're ready to get some serious pushback, that's all I'm saying. There are a lot of things that are done a certain way in c for a reason. Conventions have developed over the last few decades, and c system code doesn't look at all like c++ application code. You can safely assume a certain level of expertise in system code - if the person doesn't have it, it'll be apparent quickly because nothing they do will work.
It's like the engineering professor who proposed that the best test of their teaching ability would be to have the teachers take a ride in airplanes that their students designed. "That's no fair!!!" So finally, one of them asked "Would YOU get in a plane designed by one of your students?" "Of course. It would be the safest flight in the world - it would never get off the ground."
It's not cryptic to confound others - that's just a side effect, but it does raise the bar, which is a good thing.
I look at the language standard. Look at the if() statement. It is followed by one line, and a semicolon. No parenthesis. Parenthesis allow you to group multiple lines (blockify) - and its' always possible to replace any block of code with a one-liner (either a function call, a macro, or even using the comma operator).
Indent your code properly and you'll never have a problem with parenthesis - and your code will be more concise, thus easier to read.
Adding brackets increases the visual pollution, and I really hate it when people put the opening brace on its own line - its a waste of a line. Folding editors can handle braces at the end of the line just fine - why can't people? Concise can be clear as well.