[<< | Prev | Index | Next | >>]

Sunday, January 17, 2021

The Thinking Programmer

Why good programming leads to good thinking in general: To be a really good programmer, you have to be in the habit of constantly searching for exceptions to your assumptions (both to avoid bugs, and--worse--architectural dead ends).

There is a moment every programmer feels when they make a bad choice (often necessarily for expediency): When they embrace a simplification or assumption which they know there are exceptions to, because the more general form is a big can of worms. Another one is when they subsequently special case those exceptions instead of using the more general form. Another one is when they keep all of that instead of throwing it out and starting over because they don't want to lose the work they've done.

As an aside, having perused a bit of law, our legal system is exactly a very large, very bad program written by many many very bad programmers.

[<< | Prev | Index | Next | >>]