The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Thursday, Debtember 20, 2007

“Code's worst enemy” is code itself

Using about three billion words, Steve Yegge makes the observation that the higher level the code, the less lines it takes to express a program, which is basically a truism in Computer Science. For instance, it's easier to write:

x1 = ((A * y) + B) * x * (1.0 - x)

than it is:

fldc1
fsub	[x]
fld	[A]
fmul	[y]
fadd	[B]
fmul	[x]
fmul
fst	[x1]

In fact, mod_blog would be about three times longer if it were written in Assembly than in C (and to be fair, it might take less code if it were written in Python).

So what Steve says isn't anything new in this regard.

But in Steve's billion line manifesto, he does raise a few points about IDEs that may make my own ideas moot (or a lot less easy to implement generally).

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