2010/3/3 Wesley Smith <[email protected]>: > On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 1:18 PM, Andrey Fedorov <[email protected]> wrote: >> John Zabroski wrote: >>> >>> the three stumbling blocks are size, complexity and trustworthiness >> >> How are these different? >> A small program is a simple program by definition, assuming it's expressed >> in an intuitively comprehensible way. > > I disagree that a small program is by definition a simple program.
Indeed, and it may help to lay a simple concrete example alongside Wesley's theoretical approach: think of the difference between, say, a short recursive function to traverse a tree and apply a callback. It can even look quite simple on the page, but the chances are that there are hidden depths. (This is certainly my experience with writing such functions). Contrast with a long application initialisation routine, of what I call "narrative" code, which is simply a list of "do this, do that": initialise the windowing system, start the event loop, register an event handler, open the main window, initialise the menus...The code is long, but there are no loops, and it's completely trivial to read (though how one knows when one has done everything one needs to is another matter!). -- http://rrt.sc3d.org _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
