Sunday, February 19, 2012

C Programmers: Don't write macros

Take pretty much any large C project today.

If you look through a couple of files, you'll notice some things are written in CAPS LOCK AS IF THEY'RE YELLING AT YOU.

These are macros.

They're not as powerful as Lisp macros; they just replace themselves with a bit of code.

C Macros are actually quite nice if they're used in moderation, because they allow you to type less.

But when you have sixteen macros in one line, you really need to stop.

Please.

So, this is my plea to all of you C programmers, please stop writing more macros, because you're going to regret them when you have to go hire a new guy and he'll spend 19 weeks trying to figure out what all the YELLING ACTUALLY MEANS.




2 comments:

  1. Do you have a link to some of the over-macro code of which you speak? Curious how our own source compares :)

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    1. Not off the top of my head, but, some game development libraries for sure. I'll try to find something alter today.

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