/
22.08.2020 at 05:49 pm
Cuttings

Decoding Code Specimens

Dissect code like 18th century scientists do their biological specimens.

... But then it hit me. Code is not literature and we are not readers. Rather, interesting pieces of code are specimens and we are naturalists. So instead of trying to pick out a piece of code and reading it and then discussing it like a bunch of Comp Lit. grad students, I think a better model is for one of us to play the role of a 19th century naturalist returning from a trip to some exotic island to present to the local scientific society a discussion of the crazy beetles they found: "Look at the antenna on this monster! They look incredibly ungainly but the male of the species can use these to kill small frogs in whose carcass the females lay their eggs."

The point of such a presentation is to take a piece of code that the presenter has understood deeply and for them to help the audience understand the core ideas by pointing them out amidst the layers of evolutionary detritus (a.k.a. kluges) that are also part of almost all code. One reasonable approach might be to show the real code and then to show a stripped down reimplementation of just the key bits, kind of like a biologist staining a specimen to make various features easier to discern.

Peter Seibel's analogy on the good (but difficult to maintain) habit of reading code.

Filed under:
#
Words: 17 words approx.
Time to read: 0.07 mins (at 250 wpm)
Keywords:
, , , , , , , , ,

Other suggested posts

  1. 18.10.2022 at 09:36 am / The Airplane Test of Fluency
  2. 10.06.2022 at 07:44 pm / Teach Thy Tongue to Say: 'I Do Not Know'
  3. 11.01.2019 at 06:39 pm / Clarity of Liskov
  4. 23.08.2018 at 01:33 am / Darwin's Details
  5. 03.01.2017 at 12:00 am / Debugging: Twice As Hard As Writing Code
  6. 16.01.2015 at 12:00 am / Ih Ah! (Devin Townsend)
  7. 05.07.2014 at 12:00 am / Jack Hamm on (Artistic) Practice
  8. 04.07.2012 at 12:00 am / When To Not Use Data Structures/Algorithms
  9. 24.08.2010 at 12:00 am / Correspondences With Matt Treyvaud
© Wan Zafran. See disclaimer.