What role does occam's razor play in software development? Any? Or did it used to, and now it doesn't any more.
By the way, I apologize if I am not staying with this discussion adequately. The last few days have been a firehose of good stuff and, to be honest, I am choking on it. N Nicholas Thompson Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology Clark University [email protected] https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/ -----Original Message----- From: Friam <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Russell Standish Sent: Thursday, December 26, 2019 9:39 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] IT is Not Sustainable On Thu, Dec 26, 2019 at 07:29:27AM +0000, Marcus Daniels wrote: > Most programmers won't struggle to rationalize or improve code written by other people. The problem is that people are selfish. They think that their 10K LOC problem is beautiful and nimble, but that 1M LOC was once that too. It's the behavior of teenagers. Well the examples I mentioned were all rewritten/refactored from a selfish need - I had inherited code that I had experienced as having high technical debt, requiring much more effort to modify for future needs than ought to be, and eventually persuaded my PM that fixing that debt was a good investment. Of course a piece of crap code that happens to work just fine, and doesn't need to be touched, I will leave that well alone, of if necessary, craft an interface that takes care of administrative needs (such as memory allocation and so on). I only refactor code that gets in the way of getting the job done. My point really was that the difficulty of working on a codebase is directly correlated with LOC, and that acceptable brevity a desirable trait (my taste for brevity seems to be much more developed than many of my colleagues, however, perhaps because I have a mathematical background!). -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Senior Research Fellow [email protected] Economics, Kingston University http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
