Good, Fast, Cheap: Pick Any Two

I'm wholly in favor of making things maintainable, and I have no interest in gratuitous confusion. So I think we are in broad agreement.

However, when I'm under a deadline, I simply don't have the time to optimize for readability; I have to optimize for speed of programming and ease of debugging (that's debugging my own code, BTW :-)). And the shorter my code is, the less likely it is to be broken.

I'm reminded of something Kipling is reported to have written: ``I apologize for the length of this letter, but I had no time to make it shorter.'' In constrast, writing short Perl code is easy; when I'm programming for money, I have no time to make it longer.

-- Chip Salzenberg, Free-Floating Agent of Chaos

Comment on Good, Fast, Cheap: Pick Any Two

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RE: Good, Fast, Cheap: Pick Any Two by tilly (Archbishop) on Aug 11, 2000 at 19:09 UTC
You have just hit on one thing I love about Perl. Perl is a true master at the, "keep it short and sweet" school of maintainability. People who think about keeping million line projects under control tend to lose sight of the fact that that is even possible! One thing that novices forget. Optimizing for the ease of debugging in the end is a very good way to optimize for the speed of programming as well. People say, "I didn't have time to think about that" and then wonder why they seem to spend all of their time tracking down bugs...	[reply]

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RE: Good, Fast, Cheap: Pick Any Two
by tilly (Archbishop) on Aug 11, 2000 at 19:09 UTC

One thing that novices forget. Optimizing for the ease of debugging in the end is a very good way to optimize for the speed of programming as well. People say, "I didn't have time to think about that" and then wonder why they seem to spend all of their time tracking down bugs...

[reply]