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The old yarn I'd heard for years is close to this. Make it work. Make it work right. Make it work fast. In that order. Now it could be argued that "work righ

The old yarn I'd heard for years is close to this. Make it work. Make it work right. Make it work fast. In that order. Now it could be argued that "work right" can be read as "make it (work right)", or "(make it work) right", or both, but I think the point of this saying is that the "fast" part should always come later.

taneq 8y ago
Yep, this is the version I heard. I think the distinction between "make it work" and "make it work right" is important, though - where "work" means "solve the problem", and "work right" means "solve the problem in a robust and reliable manner." If your software doesn't solve the problem, it's useless, no matter how correct or fast it is. Once it solves the problem, then you can work on making it bug free and elegant. Once you're done with that, only then should you look at making it fast. Note, of course, that "make it fast" refers to gratuitous optimisation. If it's too slow to solve the problem, then it doesn't work, and that needs to be fixed. A similar adage states the rules of code optimisation: 1) Don't. 2) (For experts only) Do it later.
- sethrin 8y ago
  3) Profile before optimization.
  - AstralStorm 8y ago
    4) After thinking how to get beat bang for buck when optimizing. Profilers don't always pinpoint the culprit.
    - kungtotte 8y ago
      I have a hard time seeing how profilers don't at least point you in the right direction. Or are we using different definitions of the word? They tell you how much time is spent in any given section of your program. If 80% of the time is spent in 20% of the code, it's usually a safe bet that's where you should start looking!
      - sethrin 8y ago
        Profilers have limitations like anything else, and it's possible to be pointing the flashlight in the wrong place. I probably wouldn't include that as a list item. By the by, is there more than one kungtotte on the Internet? It took me a minute to think why that name was so familiar, but then I remembered watching a few hundred Beaglerush videos.
        kungtotte 8y ago
        There must be more than one, because I've never heard of Beaglerush. I've used this handle for a long time though (20 years or so), so it's all over the internet.
        sethrin 8y ago
        Kk, thank you for indulging my curiosity. Beaglerush is a very humorous Aussie who is notable for a video series on the Long War mod for the game XCOM. Long War turns a moderately challenging game of thirty or forty hours into an extremely complex, impossibly difficult ordeal of at least 400 hours per game. Beagle apparently often uses the handles of his friends as character names, and one of the best/worst parts of XCOM is that it's really good at making you care about the little blobs of pixels you order into virtual mortal peril, so to me kungtotte is like, the hero of 100 missions :) If you're into strategy games, XCOM is good, and Long War is matchless. However, Beaglerush is actually surprisingly entertaining even if you don't care for his subject; the girlfriend is still not much into the game, but after the first couple episodes she insisted on watching the other hundred-thirty-odd videos. It's probably not everyone's cuppa, but it could be a thing.
        kungtotte 8y ago
        Oh, that's me then :) I didn't put two and two together because I knew him as just beagle, and it was a long time ago that I hung out with him. We played together in a gaming community known as ShackTac or ShackTactical, playing a game called Armed Assault/ArmA. Way back when a bunch of us put our names into a custom name file for XCOM so people could make campaigns featuring ShackTac people instead of generic dudes. I completely forgot about that until you reminded me. It must be five years since I talked to him :)
cbsmith 8y ago
The make it work fast portion isn't controversial. Premature optimization and all that... The "make it work" implies a level of correctness & performance that is acceptable, which is why any subsequent steps are after thoughts.
- AstralStorm 8y ago
  The missing part is "make it workable". By that I mean reasonably easy to modify. This may or may not involve simplicity but usually involves modularity and lack of hard impingement interdependencies - weak coupling. If you skip that, you will relatively quickly reach the point of a full rewrite.
Buttons840 8y ago
Sometimes I try to implement a common task in a new library, and I find that if I chain these 4 API calls and then extract some data with a regex, it will do what I want. I rarely actually implement the task this way though, because I know it's a common task, and there must be a better way. Sure enough, after some more research and reading of documentation I find one simple API call that does what I want. I take this to the extreme, I probably wouldn't implement the complicated API / regex chain without 4+ hours of reading documentation and other research. It bothers me that much. If it seems like a simple and common task, I refuse to believe that there isn't a simple API call already to do what I want, I just have to find it. Sometimes, the simple API call really doesn't exist though, and you have to do what you can, with some comments explaining why. I've noticed some developers will implement the 4 API chain followed by a regex as soon as they find it, and never give a second thought that there might be a simpler way.
- nicbou 8y ago
  This is good, because that process now becomes the API's problem and not yours. Their tests cover it, not yours, and it makes your work simpler.

taneq 8y ago

Yep, this is the version I heard. I think the distinction between "make it work" and "make it work right" is important, though - where "work" means "solve the problem", and "work right" means "solve the problem in a robust and reliable manner." If your software doesn't solve the problem, it's useless, no matter how correct or fast it is. Once it solves the problem, then you can work on making it bug free and elegant. Once you're done with that, only then should you look at making it fast. Note, of course, that "make it fast" refers to gratuitous optimisation. If it's too slow to solve the problem, then it doesn't work, and that needs to be fixed. A similar adage states the rules of code optimisation: 1) Don't. 2) (For experts only) Do it later.

sethrin 8y ago
3) Profile before optimization.
- AstralStorm 8y ago
  4) After thinking how to get beat bang for buck when optimizing. Profilers don't always pinpoint the culprit.
  - kungtotte 8y ago
    I have a hard time seeing how profilers don't at least point you in the right direction. Or are we using different definitions of the word? They tell you how much time is spent in any given section of your program. If 80% of the time is spent in 20% of the code, it's usually a safe bet that's where you should start looking!
    - sethrin 8y ago
      Profilers have limitations like anything else, and it's possible to be pointing the flashlight in the wrong place. I probably wouldn't include that as a list item. By the by, is there more than one kungtotte on the Internet? It took me a minute to think why that name was so familiar, but then I remembered watching a few hundred Beaglerush videos.
      - kungtotte 8y ago
        There must be more than one, because I've never heard of Beaglerush. I've used this handle for a long time though (20 years or so), so it's all over the internet.
        sethrin 8y ago
        Kk, thank you for indulging my curiosity. Beaglerush is a very humorous Aussie who is notable for a video series on the Long War mod for the game XCOM. Long War turns a moderately challenging game of thirty or forty hours into an extremely complex, impossibly difficult ordeal of at least 400 hours per game. Beagle apparently often uses the handles of his friends as character names, and one of the best/worst parts of XCOM is that it's really good at making you care about the little blobs of pixels you order into virtual mortal peril, so to me kungtotte is like, the hero of 100 missions :) If you're into strategy games, XCOM is good, and Long War is matchless. However, Beaglerush is actually surprisingly entertaining even if you don't care for his subject; the girlfriend is still not much into the game, but after the first couple episodes she insisted on watching the other hundred-thirty-odd videos. It's probably not everyone's cuppa, but it could be a thing.
        kungtotte 8y ago
        Oh, that's me then :) I didn't put two and two together because I knew him as just beagle, and it was a long time ago that I hung out with him. We played together in a gaming community known as ShackTac or ShackTactical, playing a game called Armed Assault/ArmA. Way back when a bunch of us put our names into a custom name file for XCOM so people could make campaigns featuring ShackTac people instead of generic dudes. I completely forgot about that until you reminded me. It must be five years since I talked to him :)

cbsmith 8y ago

The make it work fast portion isn't controversial. Premature optimization and all that... The "make it work" implies a level of correctness & performance that is acceptable, which is why any subsequent steps are after thoughts.

AstralStorm 8y ago
The missing part is "make it workable". By that I mean reasonably easy to modify. This may or may not involve simplicity but usually involves modularity and lack of hard impingement interdependencies - weak coupling. If you skip that, you will relatively quickly reach the point of a full rewrite.

Buttons840 8y ago

Sometimes I try to implement a common task in a new library, and I find that if I chain these 4 API calls and then extract some data with a regex, it will do what I want. I rarely actually implement the task this way though, because I know it's a common task, and there must be a better way. Sure enough, after some more research and reading of documentation I find one simple API call that does what I want. I take this to the extreme, I probably wouldn't implement the complicated API / regex chain without 4+ hours of reading documentation and other research. It bothers me that much. If it seems like a simple and common task, I refuse to believe that there isn't a simple API call already to do what I want, I just have to find it. Sometimes, the simple API call really doesn't exist though, and you have to do what you can, with some comments explaining why. I've noticed some developers will implement the 4 API chain followed by a regex as soon as they find it, and never give a second thought that there might be a simpler way.

nicbou 8y ago
This is good, because that process now becomes the API's problem and not yours. Their tests cover it, not yours, and it makes your work simpler.