[PD] about [prepend] on osx

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Sun, 27 Nov 2005, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:

> Ultimately, the question is not about how much time you spend scrolling,
> but how much time you spend till you have completed and debugged code.

Right. But then you have to explain to me how writing longer words on more
lines really help on the debuggability. It seems to me that debuggability
is about keeping the code modularised so that not too many things are in
the same context at the same time, so that programmers are less confused, 
so that they create less bugs in the first place, or find bugs more 
quickly.

> The time it takes to write code is trivial compared to the time spent
> debugging and maintaining it.

It depends. There's more to writing code than just writing it.

Do you count the amount of time that the code matures in the mind before
being dumped into the computer?

What about writing less bugs in the first place?

What counts as maintenance depends on when the original project is
considered as having ended. Software engineering is the only kind of
engineering in which completely new developments are considered as 
"maintenance". ;-)

> That's why you have such practices as extreme programming, which
> actually slows down the process of getting the code written, but overall
> is much more efficient.

And you can bet it doesn't achieve its goal by requiring longer
identifiers!!!

XP and PP practitioners don't swear by particularly long identifiers and
spacious formatting (even if they often tend in that direction). Instead
they swear by concepts like OnceAndOnlyOnce (DontRepeatYourself) and
TestDrivenDevelopment and PairProgramming and making very small methods
and RefactoringMercilessly and developing incrementally.

I've even heard them saying that code should not be commented: the
opposite of Knuth's CWEB!. I think this is not incompatible with your 
citation of Knuth, just that it requires a completely different 
interpretation of that quote, as in, the code has to be its own 
documentation, instead of interleaving English with some programming 
language.

____________________________________________________________________
Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju
Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada