Andre Engels wrote:
On Mon, Jul 6, 2009 at 9:44 AM, Martin Vilcans<mar...@librador.com> wrote:
On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 4:05 PM, kj<no.em...@please.post> wrote:
I'm will be teaching a programming class to novices, and I've run
into a clear conflict between two of the principles I'd like to
teach: code clarity vs. code reuse. I'd love your opinion about
it.
In general, code clarity is more important than reusability.
Unfortunately, many novice programmers have the opposite impression. I
have seen too much convoluted code written by beginners who try to
make the code generic. Writing simple, clear, to-the-point code is
hard enough as it is, even when not aiming at making it reusable.
If in the future you see an opportunity to reuse the code, then and
only then is the time to make it generic.
Not just that, when you actually get to that point, making simple and
clear code generic is often easier than making
complicated-and-supposedly-generic code that little bit more generic
that you need.
First, a quote which took me a bit to find:
Thomas William Körner paraphrasing Polya and Svego
in A Companion to Analysis:
Recalling that 'once is a trick, twice is a method,
thrice is a theorem, and four times a theory,' we
seek to codify this insight.
Let us apply this insight:
Suppose in writing code, we pretty much go with that.
A method is something you notice, a theorem is a function, and
a theory is a generalized function.
Even though we like DRY ("don't repeat yourself") as a maxim, let
it go the first time and wait until you see the pattern (a possible
function). I'd go with a function first, a pair of functions, and
only then look to abstracting the function.
--Scott David Daniels
scott.dani...@acm.org
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