We've all had occasion to provide a size of the codebase we're working on for a project, whether for management, or for our own resume, and there is a natural tendency to make the KLOC large - it sounds more impressive to work on or manage a large codebase then a smaller; a project that has lots of code sounds more solid, more reliable.
But there is one school of thought that holds a large codebase as a liability - it is harder to shift it; it has more inertia. And there is some merit to this; a large codebase means that there is greater chance for errors (statistically, at the very least), a greater chance for unwanted coupling, and more places where code has been unwittingly duplicated. So it behooves developers to minimize code, as described here. On the other hand, less code doing the same stuff means you've got denser code, and you are at risk of being clever. Clever code is bad because it obscures its intent, and the next developer to support the code may not be as smart as we are (or like to think we are).
So this means we've got tension between making the code simple, and making it small. The low-hanging fruit of this is reducing redundancy - it's not hard to understand that all I/O is being done through your library functions, for instance. The next best step is to use standard libraries where possible - they have the benefit of being available elsewhere, so your next set of developers are likely to have used them before. A third strategy is good naming - if reading the name does not give you the right idea of what the code does, it will confuse someone later on.
Beyond these steps, you are faced with needing to consider the density of the language you use. The current trends are towards more "advanced" languages like Python and Ruby, which cover much of the ground C/C++ do, but with less cruft, and with nice things like built-in data structures that are easy to use.
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Saturday, January 03, 2009
Monday, December 29, 2008
Conspiracy Theory
I had a really devious thought the other night. It's totally hypothetical, but it fits so well into the conspiracy theory mindset that I had to put it out for kicks.
The rise of outsourcing/offshoring in IT around 2000 caused great concern in the developer population, because we saw our livelihood disappearing. About 2004, a number of reports surfaced that claimed that IT/Software jobs would return, due to 2 things - the rise of the local job demand in the offshoring nations, and the retirement en masse of the large number of Baby Boomer developers, enjoying their retirement money, bouyed by the growing housing market. This would drastically cut the number of working developers, forcing the companies that employ them to raise salaries again, like in the dot-com boom.
This year, the housing market collapsed, taking out a large segment of the stock value. This destroyed the value of a majority of the retirement accounts of all these soon-to-retire developers, making them more likely to stay in the workforce, keeping the numbers high, and salaries low.
The greatly wealthy were not hard hit by this collapse; after all, losing 75% of 4 billion (the amount George Lucas was worth) still leaves you with 1 billion. [Note - I don't think George was in on it, he's just a well-known individual]
But having your 401k drop from $1M to $250K means you will probably have to keep working, and your best work is that which you've been doing for the past 30 years.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
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Software, SoftwareDevelopment, Computers, Programming
HTTP
The rise of outsourcing/offshoring in IT around 2000 caused great concern in the developer population, because we saw our livelihood disappearing. About 2004, a number of reports surfaced that claimed that IT/Software jobs would return, due to 2 things - the rise of the local job demand in the offshoring nations, and the retirement en masse of the large number of Baby Boomer developers, enjoying their retirement money, bouyed by the growing housing market. This would drastically cut the number of working developers, forcing the companies that employ them to raise salaries again, like in the dot-com boom.
This year, the housing market collapsed, taking out a large segment of the stock value. This destroyed the value of a majority of the retirement accounts of all these soon-to-retire developers, making them more likely to stay in the workforce, keeping the numbers high, and salaries low.
The greatly wealthy were not hard hit by this collapse; after all, losing 75% of 4 billion (the amount George Lucas was worth) still leaves you with 1 billion. [Note - I don't think George was in on it, he's just a well-known individual]
But having your 401k drop from $1M to $250K means you will probably have to keep working, and your best work is that which you've been doing for the past 30 years.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
Technorati Tags --
Software, SoftwareDevelopment, Computers, Programming
HTTP
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