I was watching engineers argue, someone was bitching about a code reviewer asking him to put more parentheses in a conditional: “As if I don’t know the precedence rules!” I don’t know them, as a matter of principle.

Seriously. I’ve learned a lot of programming languages over the years, and I’ve taken care never to learn the operator precedence rules in any of them. It’s easy to get them wrong and get bitten and why should I require that people reading my code learn those stupid rules. Today I wrote this:

while (calls.moveToNext() && (count < howMany)) {

I sorta kinda think that the parentheses after the && are superfluous, but being sure would mean memorizing something that adds no value and furthermore require that subsequent programmers do the same. So for the last couple of decades I’ve just put all the parens in, regardless.

A related case: I have never bothered to learn, nor will I, what the default modifiers for Java’s variables and methods are. Thus, every one of those things gets one of private or public or protected in front of it. There are way better things to load up the finite cupboard-space in my mind with.

No, I don’t think it’s a big deal; just saying.