Writing less code

re: Writing less code

Joe Chung — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 12:25:40 GMT

There is a balance to be struck between not compressing code enough (too fat) and compressing it too much (too skinny).

Fat code is verbose code. Fat code means that there's more code you can mess up. Fat code is easy to read, but there is more of it so it takes longer to understand.

XML is "fat."

Skinny code is less code. Less code, however, is not necessarily simpler code. When you make mistakes writing skinny code, those errors are magnified. Skinny code takes a short time to read, but it can be difficult to understand if it is too skinny.

Regular expressions are "skinny."

C# code to extract and manipulate data from relational databases and XML is "fat." C# 3.0 AND LINQ are attempts to make that code slimmer. That's a good thing, but try not to make the code too skinny.

re: Writing less code

Eric K. — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 19:25:30 GMT

Tat's definitely a refreshing thing to hear, particularly when you frequently hear from language designers about how "syntactic sugar"--shortcuts and additions that save the developer time and typing--is bad, defiles the purity of the language, and leads the developer down a slipperly slope to sloppiness, immoral behavior, drug use, and eventually Linux and PERL.

Yeah, we'd all love a nice, clean, simple, pure language, but if I have to write several dozen lines to get something done that I think I ought to get done in only one, I'm going to get tired of it really soon.

So many languages seem to have plenty of "syntactic salt"--hoops the developer *must* jump through just to prove that they know what they're doing, additional steps that must be performed, that developers making use of these languages occasionally wonder if the language designers were sadistic or did they really just not see that developers don't truly want to type for the pure joy of typing..

re: Writing less code

doug orr — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 19:07:44 GMT

reading through lesscode.org and what do I see? reference to mike champion as "one of the few remaining reasons left to respect microsoft..." I'm sure I could soften that for the present audience to, "an excellent reason to add to your respect for microsoft."

I don't disagree, really, but I hope someone on the panel pointed out all of the excellent facilities cobol and pascal had to make i/o more accessible to the masses. (I'm just sore because I think lambda expressions are great. :)

mikechampion s weblog Writing less code | Paid Surveys

mikechampion s weblog Writing less code | Paid Surveys — Sat, 30 May 2009 01:50:18 GMT

PingBack from http://paidsurveyshub.info/story.php?title=mikechampion-s-weblog-writing-less-code

mikechampion s weblog Writing less code | Cellulite Creams

mikechampion s weblog Writing less code | Cellulite Creams — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 06:13:42 GMT

PingBack from http://cellulitecreamsite.info/story.php?id=5595

mikechampion s weblog Writing less code | Green Tea Fat Burner

mikechampion s weblog Writing less code | Green Tea Fat Burner — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 22:28:15 GMT

PingBack from http://greenteafatburner.info/story.php?id=2531