@levork@graphics.social

Julian Fong @levork@graphics.social · Jul 27, 2026

Replying to @levork@graphics.social

PS I am a hypocrite who no longer lives in a Craftsman and now lives in a house with very efficient windows, AC, and white walls

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Julian Fong @levork@graphics.social · Jul 27, 2026

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Furbland's Very Family-Friendly Account™ @GroupNebula563@mastodon.social

Replying to @levork@graphics.social

I think that's plenty unhinged ranting for now. I'm sure someone years from now will point out that I wrote the most boring code, but man, did I write long commit logs, sometimes full of snark. Maybe that's the only artistic footprint I'll leave behind on a decades old code base. I hope at least it's an immediately recognizable footprint. (11/10, oops)

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Julian Fong @levork@graphics.social · Jul 27, 2026

Replying to @levork@graphics.social

Code is art. I work at a studio full of ungodly talented artists, but I will still die on this hill. Code is often messy and dirty and it's a pain to create and get right but the results reflect the personality of the creator and the pain of the creation. Just like the rest of art. Sometimes you have to look at the source code to see that, but it's there if you look for it, hidden beneath the surface. AI generated code is not art. (10/10)

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Julian Fong @levork@graphics.social · Jul 27, 2026

Replying to @levork@graphics.social

A very efficient modern house with white walls and triple paned windows and an open concept kitchen?  Ok. I think the housing analogy breaks down.  Look, I'm not saying there's a "Live Laugh Love" sign on the wall, but whatever it is, it's not an interesting personality. It's sterile? Obsequious? Verbose? There's no typo or quirk that immediately recalls an interesting whiteboard discussion in the author's office. It's just code and comments repeating what the code does. (9/10)

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Julian Fong @levork@graphics.social · Jul 27, 2026

Replying to @levork@graphics.social

It's old, it's creaky, okay, it's missing AC and you're probably going to die when it hits 100 in the summer (which happens all too often these days), but dammit, it's charming and it's artsy and you will die defending the seventeen layers of paint that have accrued in the living room (or you're just too scared to sand it because of lead paint). It's lived in and it's comfortable. Whereas if you've looked at Claude generated code, like I've had to for the past six months, it's...  (8/10)

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Julian Fong @levork@graphics.social · Jul 27, 2026

Replying to @levork@graphics.social

Someone else on my team now uses a Mac, and every now and then some Unicode hyphen character makes its way into comments and my Linux box displays a mysterious character when I page through the code that always catches me off guard.  I could go on and on about all of our recognizable quirks, but living in a code base with that history is like living in a Berkeley Craftsman home.    (7/10)

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Julian Fong @levork@graphics.social · Jul 27, 2026

Replying to @levork@graphics.social

Former coworker wrote very efficient code but spelling was not their forte, which was problematic when it came to the two L's in tessellation and related classes.. Someone on my team now is very adept with modern C++ and uses all the latest features I can't keep straight in my head. All their loops that can be range based for loops are. They can probably write a lambda correctly on the first try. There are lambdas in their code. This is probably a feature.   (6/10)

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Julian Fong @levork@graphics.social · Jul 27, 2026

Replying to @levork@graphics.social

Someone 25+ years ago had a predilection for "single return from every function", which left their code with 10+ levels of indentation, which very quickly got out of hand with 8-character tabs and 80 character screens.  Someone else used to believe that fixed size arrays of 256 were okay because surely no-one would ever use that many things, ever (HAHA production rendering SNORT). A few of those 256s persist in the code, like Cthulhu slumbering gently in the depths.. (5/10)

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Julian Fong @levork@graphics.social · Jul 27, 2026

Replying to @levork@graphics.social

Loren Carpenter (RIP), when I worked with him on the sigma buffer, wrote insanely optimized but terse code using intrinsics, but helpfully left comments referring to "Knuth TAOCP Vol2" and a page number about some constants. I'm pretty sure nobody below the age of 30 (40?) has a copy of The Art of Computer Programming just lying around to cross check those constants.   (4/10)

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Julian Fong @levork@graphics.social · Jul 27, 2026

Replying to @levork@graphics.social

Tom Duff is the inventor of the Duff Device, so you can imagine what kind of code he might write. But he also left a comment in the implicit field code which was a quote from the Preface to Samuel Johnson's Dictionary, from 1755. That's just who he is. (In a fit of hubris, many years later when I refactored the code, I left an answering comment which was a quote from the Preface to Noah Webster's "An American Dictionary of the English Language. I'm not sure Tom ever noticed this.) (3/10)

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Julian Fong @levork@graphics.social · Jul 27, 2026

Replying to @levork@graphics.social

I've been in this code base for 26+ years and I can recognize the author of many chunks simply by looking at indentation, comments, or coding style. And I can often map style to personality quirks of the author. Dan McCoy's code for converting general polyhedra from 1990 still survives today. Probably one of the few pieces of code left that actually has a "for ( ; l; l = l->next)" loop for linked lists. Dan is also the only person I've ever seen use the abbreviation R.N.G in comments. (2/10)

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Julian Fong @levork@graphics.social · Jul 27, 2026

Semi-annual blathering about AI: I still don't use any AI code in my work, but I have to review more and more of it these days. One of the things bothering me about that these days is just how lacking in personality that code is. RenderMan is a code base which is now over forty years old. It is a collection of idiosyncratic styles written by equally idiosyncratic people. (1/10)

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