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.

Tuesday, July 01, 2008

Proto-thoughts on “You aren't gonna need it” back before Extreme Programming hit the mainstream

Here's one of the rants I handwrote about a decade ago. I don't know … I think I may have lost my mind back then. There were a few bits I couldn't make out—I tended to be a bit lazy in the handwriting department, and I suspect I inherited my Mom's inability to write legibly.

The Lego™ Theory of Programming

Okay, I should point out that I have no idea what the following has to with The Lego™ Theory of Programming. It's not even close to what I understand The Lego™ Theory of Programming is today, and I have to question what I was thinking back then.

Hmm … I seem to be fisking myself here. But oh well, I'm having fun with this, and I can always claim to have changed my mind in the presence of more and better information.

Onwards …

This goes beyond the Theory of Software Reliability. Software Reliability simply states that software should be written with reuse in mind. This leads to the following Theorem:

Um, not quite. “Software Reliability” has nothing to do with “software reuse” and everything to do with “not crashing and losing a hours of work, or maybe a patient or two (or twenty-one).”

So, the names are bad. But not necessarily the theory itself.

The more general the subroutine, the slower it is, the larger it is.

Proof:

int a;
int b;
int c;

c = a + b;
anon a;
anon b;
anon c;

c = a + b;

if (typeof(a) == int && typeof(b) == int)
  c = intplus(a,b);
else if (typeof(a) == string && typeof(b) == string)
  c = strcat(a,b);

The more general the code, the more code is required to isolate the needed cases.

Proof of b)
larger: more code is required to isolate the particular case, or to extract the particular result from the general case.

Proof of [GD?] ([Anon?] B)

Code that isn't there executes faster than code that is executed. Duh!

I'm not sure if I would accept that as “proof” or not, although it does get the point across. And generally speaking, I'm not a fan of generalized code not because it bloats code, but because it complicates the code unnecessarily. And I'm not the only one who feels that way (link via flutterby).

I should probably expand my thoughts on this …

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