Darren New wrote:
James G. Sack (jim) wrote:
<heh> Maybe they're not all above everyone else. I only met one MIT CS
grad, and he was a good programmer but had one particularly annoying
desire to write one-big-thing, instead of modularizing.
Remember that how big a "thing" is depends on how smart you are and how
much you can remember. The main good reason to modularize is to reduce
complexity - if you can keep it all in your head at once, you don't have
to modularize. Or pick good variable names. Or not reuse the same name
to mean something completely different later.
(I've known a few people who are *way* too smart to write good code. The
stuff works great, but it's utterly incomprehensible unless you can
remember 1000 lines of code and what its doing.)
*Everybody* has a limit that they hit where they need to abstract the
system heavily. Mine is about 10000 lines of code.
The problem with extremely smart programmers is that they are used to
programming below that limit. Once they cross that limit, they break.
I actually blame this for much of the failure of Lisp. Lisp lets smart
people program below their limit for much longer than other languages.
The problem is that they never learn how to do the grunt work necessary
to program *above* that limit.
-a
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