You're right of course. Clearly Brian Kernigan was referring to something like you describe. Nevertheless I couldn't help arguing that that type of cleverness is stupid. I started programming late 60ties begin 70ties and always have had trouble convincing my colleages to think/design/document and talk with future users before coding. If you wish you can interpret my comment as a frustration that I felt like a profet in the desert. Jos
_____ From: Laurent [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: martes, 19 de marzo de 2013 8:20 To: Jos Koot Cc: Harry Spier; users Subject: Re: [racket] OFFTOPIC - Quote on Programming I think "clever" here is meant in the "smart-ass" sense. Let me take this smart-ass definition to be measured by how much you write "compressed" code (in the sense of Kolmogorov complexity, which incomputability fits well with the cleverness). You have a compression function C: Program -> Program which compresses a program to the best /you/ can in reasonable time. So we have, for any program p you write, the length l(p) is greater or equal to the length l(C(p)). Now say you are able to debug a program p only if l(p) > C(p) + N bits (we are in log scale, so addition instead of twice). Then if you compress a program to the most /you/ can, i.e. you write a program p so that l(p) = C(p), then you're screwed for debugging it. I.e., between "Never write the same code twice" and "Compress your programs as much as possible", there's a line one should not cross. Laurent On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 6:20 AM, Jos Koot <[email protected]> wrote: Well, that may depend on how you define "clever code". Surely it is clever to write well documented code that can easily be understood, debugged, maintained and reused by yourself and by others. Understanding may require knowledge of the discipline the code is written for, of course. In my opinion it helps a lot first finishing the documentation and the design (both user and 'inside' docs) before starting coding. With good and well described design it is even possible to leave the coding to another person, just like an architect designs a building and constructors build it. My 2c, Jos _____ From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Harry Spier Sent: martes, 19 de marzo de 2013 2:56 To: users Subject: [racket] OFFTOPIC - Quote on Programming I found this quote on a blog and couldn't help sharing it :-) "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are by definition not smart enough to debug it." Brian Kernigan ____________________ Racket Users list: http://lists.racket-lang.org/users
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