Hi all,
I've been collecting videos of software developers explaining their code
to new team members. This is revealing some categorisations of code in
their own words.
One common categorisation of code is to split it into "boilerplate"
and the "meat" or "guts". The meat is the interesting stuff, the
boilerplate code is "really boring" and repetitive. Others I've seen
include "some setup stuff", "some error handling", GUI and backend, and
design patterns.
This is work in progress, let me know if you'd be interested in the results!
Regards,
Becky
On 07/10/11 09:18, C.Douce wrote:
Hi Raoul,
One thought that came to my mind is the difference between code
written for dedicated real-time systems, and code that is written for
'applications' (in the broadest sense). Embedded code has to fit
with a bunch of constraints: processor, memory, and domain. Code
that is written to make, say, a database engine work has to take
account of a myriad of different and competing requirements, and I
guess, you might describe such an engine as 'general purpose'. The
wider the domain of application, the more magic stuff you've got to
write.
This reminds me of this software rule that paraphrases one about
project, i.e. 'work expands to occupy the time available'. In
software, it feels like it goes, 'software expands to occupy the
memory, processing and bandwidth available' (but in the meantime, we
figure out what new cool stuff we can do... which, of course, means
more code!)
Plus, it's easier to add to code than to take away, since if we
remove stuff, someone may invariably shout, 'hey! this isn't working
anymore!' :-)
Chris
-----Original Message----- From: Lindsay Marshall
[mailto:lindsay.marsh...@newcastle.ac.uk] Sent: 07 October 2011
07:00 To: Derek M Jones Cc: Raoul Duke; Ppig-Discuss-List Subject:
Re: studies of source code line purposes?
along the lines of a thought i've had of late "why is there so
much *code*!?", i wonder if anybody has tired to study programs
and categorize the source code into purposes, so we could get a
feel for
I would have thought that quite a lot of the work on "patterns" might
be relevant to this, even if only indirectly.
L.
--
Rebecca Yates
http://staff.lero.ie/ryates/
Lero - The Irish Software Engineering Research Centre
University of Limerick
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