• "Programming means making trade offs. Ideally, code should be correct ... , fast, resource friendly, 4with a5small memory footprint, 4using a5 small amount of code, easy to maintain, 4and5 easy to understand"

    • All of this is good and logical. Im not new to programming, just programming in Perl. I admit, however, I do ignore a lot of things or rather take many things for granted when coding simply because I <admittance type=shameful>assume</admittance> that shorter code is quicker and less resource munching.
    Perhaps there is a quick way to take a script and push it through some kind of perl module or perl-builtin function that can monitor the resources during runtime and spit out the resources used during that runtime. I know we have the benchmark module but admittedly I know next to nothing about what all it can do and how it can be used to monitor whole scripts (if indeed it can do so). And what I do know about it I have learned here on PerlMonks. It seems to be best used for finite benchmarking of code within a script and not the script itself. I will look at the documentation for benchmark more closely this evening when I have time to. It seems a little unreasonable and very time consuming, though not necessarily ridiculous, to benchmark every questionable block of code in a script.

    Imo, understandability is perhaps the single most important thing when programming. Even if this means extensive documentation in the code to walk someone ** through your code. Is it just me, though? Perhaps I am just catching on to this, but short complex code -eq obfuscated code? But this is exactly my question. Why would the Perl developers make it possible to write tight liners (heh, thats what I call em) if it wasn't something that wasn't ''good''. I understand that it is most likely not always a good thing as not everything can always be good, but two things come to mind regarding this kind of code:

  • 1. A tight liner is easier to write (less to type) and seems like it would be more efficient.
  • 2. The operation of a tight liner doesn't seem like it would operationally be too much different from writing it out into blocks (see my first examples).

    • I am kind of playing the devil's advocate here. In doing so I am just trying to see if I can relate to both sides of the spectrum of this kind of code being good and/or bad.

    **  including yourself...yeah, we've all been down that road before where we look at something we wrote a year ago and wonder..."What on Earth was I thinking when I wrote this?"

    ----------
    - Jim

    In reply to Re: Re: Is too little too much? Coding under the microscope... by snafu
    in thread Is too little too much? Coding under the microscope... by snafu

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