The Definitive, Unimpeachable Guide to Code Brace Styles vs. Mental Disorders
Description
An image that presents a strong, humorous opinion on programming code styles for brace placement. The image displays eight different code snippets, each showing a 'while (x == y)' loop with different formatting for the opening and closing curly braces. A light green, hand-drawn circle groups together the 'Allman' and 'Kernighan & Ritchie' styles under the label 'Code styles'. In contrast, a large red, hand-drawn circle encompasses the other six styles: 'GNU', 'Whitesmiths', 'Horstmann', 'Haskell style', 'Ratliff style', and 'Lisp style'. Inside this red circle, the text boldly declares these styles to be 'Mental disorders'. The joke is a satirical take on the 'holy wars' in software development over coding conventions. It hyperbolically suggests that only the two most mainstream C-style brace placements (Allman and K&R) are valid, while all others are signs of derangement. The inclusion of 'Haskell style' and 'Lisp style' is an extra layer of humor, as those languages don't typically use curly braces for control flow, highlighting the absurdity of the argument
Comments
27Comment deleted
The fastest way to start a flame war in a room of senior engineers isn't to bring up microservices vs. monoliths; it's to show this image and declare that the green circle should be red
We can reach consensus on CAP trade-offs in minutes, but show one GNU brace and the room deadlocks harder than a naïve two-phase commit
The real mental disorder is spending three hours in a code review arguing about bracket placement while the production database is on fire and nobody's noticed the SQL injection vulnerability on line 47
After 40 years of programming, I've learned that the real mental disorder isn't your brace style - it's thinking you can win the formatting argument in a code review. The Allman vs K&R debate has claimed more engineering hours than any memory leak, and somehow we still haven't automated this away with prettier/black/gofmt everywhere. The true sign of a senior engineer? Accepting that the codebase uses Whitesmiths style and moving on with your life, because that legacy COBOL migration isn't going to architect itself
After the hundredth PR nit on Allman vs K&R, we made the entire style guide one line: run clang-format - turns out the only scalable opinion is a bot
Brace style is a distributed consensus algorithm disguised as a theological dispute - install clang-format as the single source of truth and stop running Paxos at every pull request
We've mastered Raft consensus for clusters, but brace styles still partition every PR
Lisp style looks sexy, not gonna lie... Comment deleted
In large blocks you may lose track of brackets Comment deleted
but it doesn't actually use this style cause it doesn't even have brackets Comment deleted
mental disorder: diagnosed Comment deleted
allman fans and kernighan & ritchie enjoyers Comment deleted
it has parenthesis, but it is completely fine to style parenthesis like this Comment deleted
haskell also doesn't have brackets Comment deleted
it is actually fun to write haskell code (I like category theory) Comment deleted
Only right way Comment deleted
С#/Java agent provocateur detected. Comment deleted
Wrong Im a C++ dev Comment deleted
I think this is right version Comment deleted
GNU is fine Comment deleted
a cat is fine too Comment deleted
cat? i`m drunk and may be missing something Comment deleted
Google the phrase Comment deleted
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/a-cat-is-fine-too Comment deleted
jython Comment deleted
the only mental disorder Comment deleted
Python: look what they need to mimic a fraction of our power Comment deleted