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I read the first few sentences of the post, saw what it was about (okay, fine), and then searched the page for "homeopath" to see if he actually referred to hom
by jtheory 13y ago
I read the first few sentences of the post, saw what it was about (okay, fine), and then searched the page for "homeopath" to see if he actually referred to homeopathy at all.
How do you apply homeopathic concepts to web development?
Superstitious coding is one thing, programming by "random changes until it works" is another, but none of them approach the illogic of homeopathy (find a poison that mimics the symptoms you want to cure, then dilute it in water so much that there's very likely no actual poison molecules left in your sample, then consume that).
I'm unable to conceive of a development equivalent. That's the main reason I clicked on the article.
- scott_s 13y agoMy code was broken. So I fixed it. Then, after testing, I removed the fix, because the surrounding code will remember the fix even in its absence. It's actually telling that the development equivalent of homeopathy is so obviously nonsense that no one would actually do it.
- jtheory 13y agoIt's worse than that, because you're forgetting the principal of "like cures like" (you "treat" the person with water that's remembering the poison that would cause similar symptoms to their disease). But you have a good start. Here's real homeopathic coding, then: My code was performing poorly. So I created a new module that would run several time-wasting loops... then I gradually removed all of the code from my new module (so it does nothing). Then I linked it with my existing codebase - now my code should perform much better!