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E.W. Dijkstra: "Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight". Personally, I think, much of the art o
by cjfd 8mo ago
E.W. Dijkstra: "Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight".
Personally, I think, much of the art of programming is to do as much as possible with as few lines of code as possible.
- solumunus 8mo agoThere’s more to it than that though. The solution using the least possible lines is often inscrutable and brittle. The art is in finding the right level of abstraction which can deliver the performance required while being sufficiently legible. Depending on the specific problem you have to weight your solution accordingly, if performance is critical you must often forfeit legibility. The art is in recognising and dealing with trade offs.
- em-bee 8mo agowhen building an airplane one of the goals is to figure out what you can remove without affecting the stability of the plane. performance (use of fuel) matters here too. so it's kind-of the same thing?
- embedding-shape 8mo agoAgree, and even better solution some times: no code at all.
- sedatk 8mo agoThat’s Bill Gates’, not Dijkstra’s.
- bryanrasmussen 8mo agomeasuring aphorism worth by attribution is like architecture about drowning.
- bot403 8mo agoTo be fair there was no value judgement there, just a correction in attribution.