RE: Prgramming vs. Coding

You will like to read this:

How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method (Princeton Science Library). By Polya, George.

As for how to develop the skills you mention: just work through this book - it's challenging, but worth it.

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Second Edition. By Abelson, Harold / Sussman, Gerald Jay / Sussman, Julie.

Conceptually, I think programming can be regarded as problem solving by means of symbol manipulation. And yes, I think the essence of programming (as Fred Brook characterizes it in his classic essay "No Silver Bullet" (see The Mythical Man-Month : Essays On Software Engineering. By Brooks, Frederick P. Jr.)) is reducing complexity into manageable chunks.

In fact, there is a very easy and common way to use this method when coding: Just write down your thoughts on how to solve the problem in English with some pseudo-code (while loops etc.) to improve clarity. Comment out what you have written. Hack it apart and elaborate on each part in code. You get a good high-level structure, and comments for free.

Christian Lemburg
Brainbench MVP for Perl
http://www.brainbench.com

Comment on RE: Prgramming vs. Coding

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RE: RE: Prgramming vs. Coding by chromatic (Archbishop) on Oct 09, 2000 at 07:12 UTC
Indeed, that sounds very much like Knuth's literate programming (see Google if you're supremely curious) technique. Disciplined adherance to this approach guarantees that the documentation and code will always remain in synch. However, it often does require that a separate program separate (heh) the code from the comments before compilation. POD has certain elements of this (but it's definitely not the same). Javadoc is a little closer. The only person I've seen who really does this is Andrew Johnson, in Elements of Programming with Perl. In my opinion, it's more valuable on big projects, but it's a good technique when you're stuck on a problem and need to break it down before you can write code.	[reply]

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RE: RE: Prgramming vs. Coding
by chromatic (Archbishop) on Oct 09, 2000 at 07:12 UTC

Google

Disciplined adherance to this approach guarantees that the documentation and code will always remain in synch. However, it often does require that a separate program separate (heh) the code from the comments before compilation.

POD has certain elements of this (but it's definitely not the same). Javadoc is a little closer.

The only person I've seen who really does this is Andrew Johnson, in Elements of Programming with Perl.

In my opinion, it's more valuable on big projects, but it's a good technique when you're stuck on a problem and need to break it down before you can write code.

[reply]