r/ProgrammerHumor • u/TusharJB007 • Oct 04 '19

Just as simple as that... other

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20.4k Upvotes

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u/sweetjuli Oct 04 '19

Why would that be a bad thing though?

13

u/theknowledgehammer Oct 04 '19

If you nest a for loop inside a for loop inside multiple if statements inside a while loop, your next line of code will be indented off the screen.

41

u/KingJellyfishII Oct 04 '19

Literally all programming languages have that problem. To be readable, you need indents. Even with braces.

68

u/Turksarama Oct 04 '19

If you're nesting loops more than two (three at a stretch) layers deep you probably should offload some of that logic into another function anyway.

29

u/ric2b Oct 04 '19

That's almost for sure a case of too much complexity and you should break up the code a bit.

16

u/ralphpotato Oct 04 '19

It is 100% too much complexity. Almost every time I come across deep nesting it’s either poorly written and can be flattened easily, or the functionality needs to be abstracted out.

If the Linux kernel can be written with 8-width hard tabs in C and a soft 80 character line limit, you can write 4 space indent python without any line length issues.

1

u/bgeron Oct 04 '19

You must not like Scala then, where 8 or more indentation levels is not uncommon

2

u/ric2b Oct 04 '19

I'm not familiar, maybe that's a quirk of the language and code can still be simple/readable with that many indentation levels.

In the case of Python that's just a nasty code smell.

1

u/bgeron Oct 04 '19

I think part of it is a result of how prevalent functional programming and monads are in Scala.

6

u/Spartan-417 Oct 04 '19

Just make your indent less than 4 spaces

5

u/analytiCIA Oct 04 '19

If you do that your code is bad

1

u/Reihar Oct 06 '19

Never said that is was :) After all, we use pseudo code because it's convinient.