What's your witty remark to my claim there? Or have you realized you don't know what you're talking about (yet again) and just refuse to admit it?

Quote:

Just because the untrained programmer requires structure and restraint to be forced upon him, does not mean those with dicipline are without self emposed structure and restraint.

When was the last time you did coding for a commercial product? Never? Well I have. And let me tell you, I had a project to do (which I really can't go into detail on for legal reasons), anyway I accomplished the goal, and the code I wrote was super fast. However, my code made use of several "dirty tricks" to allow for added speed and reduced memory usage, it also used some obscure techniques. As a result, if you didn't know what my code did, you could not figure it out, there were too many confusing parts. So I submitted it to my boss, and guess what happened? I was promptly told to do it over. I then told him that there was no faster way to do it. He responded with "do you think our users care about the difference between an operation that takes 2 microseconds and one that takes 4 microseconds?" He then went on to add, "It might be fast, but I can't tell what the damn thing does. That means no one except you is ever going to touch this code, and thats not good at all". Basically, I was forced to redo the code in straight normal C. The code was slightly slower, but now, even a 1st year programming student could look at the code and figure out what it does whereas before someone who had been working with C for 10 years would have had to give it some real thought. At the time I had the attitude "faster is better" but I've since changed that attitude simply because NO ONE in the computer programming field lives by that mantra. To quote my current professor "The grade for a computer program is 8 parts style, 2 parts speed." Meaning, the way the code looks is sometimes more important than the way it works. If you want to dispute that, well thats fine but I'll ask you this, show me your credentials? Where did you receive your degree in computer science? Where have you worked as a programmer professionally? Etc. Because I think you haven't a clue what you are talking about. If you disagree with me, you just prove you don't know the first thing about programming. There are whole books written on just C/C++ programming style, so it is a very important issue. And if you want to neglect it, then you prove that you're just arguing for the sake of arguing.