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Tweylast Sunday at 7:57 PM1 replyview on HN

I maintain — they shouldn't be fancy. ‘Fancy’ is the mark of something your language doesn't support well. They can be _long_, and that's often worth breaking up, but if something is ‘fancy’ it's because it's not clear to read, so you should attach some identifier to it that explains what it's supposed to mean. That's significantly, though not exclusively, a function (ha) of the syntax used to express the concept.

If you're working with Roman numerals, division is a very fancy thing to do.


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Y_Ylast Sunday at 8:03 PM

Fair enough. I think it qualifies as "essential complexity" and in my limited experience it's not a common use case and so doesn't make sense to optimize for.

In fact in my academic and professional career most of the highly "functional" C that I've come across has been written by me, when I'd rather amuse myself than make something readable.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_complexity

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