London Coder

There’s quote attributed to Blaise Pascal that goes:

“The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter.”

It’s an observation that brevity is more difficult to produce that verbosity.

However, modern programming ideologies encourage you to write your solutions in a verbose framework or with an X-first methodology (pick an X) or with restrictive rules to help you “be a better programmer”.

There are plenty of (typically aggressive) ideology pundits that will rattle off the usual straw-man arguments about using their strict set of rules: the power of sameness, easier maintainance, easily understood code… etc. etc. You can usually spot these people because conversations with them feel like you’re playing an old skool text-based adventure game …and you’re probably stuck in a loop.

The truth is that only Deliberate Practice will make you a better programmer. Only loose coupling and simple architecture will make a system maintainable. And the ONLY way to make good software is to build it for the people that will use it, with their feedback.

Having 7 classes where you could have had 2 is gold-plating. Building everything to an interface is gold-plating. Having more than 1 factory is gold-plating.

So the next time your tempted to build a system of abstractions think of the words of Seneca:

“Love of bustle is not industry”

Aside: In Pascal’s day letters cam in iterations because there were word processors, perhaps a good thing we’ve lost…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 at 9:30 am and is filed under Architecture, Development, Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.