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A single line of code from a large application that somehow manages to provide an almost endless insight into the pain that its maintainers face each day.
Python's "batteries included" approach means that a lot of common tasks have high-level convenience functions for them. For example, if you want to read all the lines from a file into an array (list, in Python), you could do something like:
Jan 25with open(filename) as f:
lines = f.readlines()
As the saying goes, there are only two hard problems in computer science: naming things, cache invalidations, and off by one errors. Chris's predecessor decided to tackle the second one, mostly by accurately(?) naming a class:
class SimpleCache
{
}
Tim has been working on a large C++ project which has been around for many, many years. It's a tool built for, in Tim's words, "an esoteric field", and most of the developers over the past 30 years have been PhD students.
This particular representative line is present with its original whitespace, and the original variable names. It has been in the code base since 2010.