The Hardest Program I've Ever Written
Great blog post and super interesting.My feeling though is the problem is they have a line limit. Maybe they should rethink their style. I'm serious.Before I worked at Google, in 30 years of programming I never worked at a company that had a line limit. Adding a line limit at Google did not make me more productive. At first I thought "hey, I guess 80 chars makes side by side comparison easier" but then I thought back, hmm. I never had problems comparing code before when I didn't have a line limit.Instead what I found was that 80 character limit was a giant waste of time. The article just pointed out a year of wasted time. I can point to searching and replacing an identifier and then having to go manually reformat hundreds of lines of code all because of some arbitrary style guide. I also had code generators at google that had to generate code that followed the line limit. I too wasted days futsing with the generator to break the lines at the correct places all because of some arbitrary line limit.That should be the real takeaway here. Make sure each rule of your style guide actually serves a purpose or that its supposed benefits outway its costs.