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> DNA is really simple. It just consists of small parts that are being used in a chemical reaction. It's very simple to understand the chemical reaction because
by valenterry 4y ago
> DNA is really simple. It just consists of small parts that are being used in a chemical reaction. It's very simple to understand the chemical reaction because it's only based on four chemical bases. Sometimes DNA is really long, but it's easy to understand what it does because it simply does what each of its parts does.
I guess it's easy to see the difference between "easy to read a line" and "easy to understand a whole program" now?
- AlbertoGP 4y agoHi, you seem confused. It’s not a binary choice: for a same program, the version where each line is easier to understand by itself is easier to understand as a whole.
- valenterry 4y agoOnly under the assumption that the number of lines is equal, which is almost never true.
- rbanffy 4y agoThe individual "files" are usually very simple. They are chained together into more complicated programs, but they rarely go much beyond driving a single screen or report.
- valenterry 4y agoVery simple, sure, but in comparison to what? Maybe the same "file" can be even simpler with less lines but each line itself being less simple.
- rbanffy 4y agoI never did it myself, but a friend of mine compares writing code for CICS to AWS lambdas: small and self-contained programs, strung together into a transaction processing system.
- valenterry 4y agoI have had to deal with e.g. JCL and from my experience it is a PITA. It's like when you have a bunch of small bash tools, each doing their job well. Then you have a this big script, that calls them and has to glue everything together and is hard to test and understand even though the small bits are all easy. I admit though that some things are easier - but this is mostly due to architecture. You rely on one big host and one big database. You don't have to deal with a distributed system then. However it also limits the range of business applications that you can build with such a system.
- rbanffy 4y agoEven its creators say JCL is the most horrible language ever devised.
- tux3 4y agoThat is not true, to the point it'd be fun to make a contest where each line has to look simple, but the result is hard to understand or easy to misunderstand. Sort of like the underhanded C code contest, but optimizing for simple parts that create a complex whole.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]