in reply to Development Speed and Productivity

Cutting and pasting results in false productivity! Sure, you get something done now, but you are slowed as time goes by.

The majority of time and money is spent in maintaining code. Time spent making code maintainable pays off again and again. A well thought-out module allows faster code-reuse than proficiency with pasting, and is more maintainable to boot.

For some real productivity try getting enough sleep, then learning from books like Code Complete or The Pragmatic Programmer. An interesting tidbit from Code Complete. The most productive programmers spend substantially less time coding than others. Instead they spend time in design, discussion, testing, and other activities.

  • Comment on Re (tilly) 1: Development Speed and Productivity

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Re: Re (tilly) 1: Development Speed and Productivity
by mothra (Hermit) on Nov 24, 2000 at 22:10 UTC

    As I mentioned, the copying and pasting was referring to, in this example, writing stored procs. ie. If I'm writing a proc where I have the query:

    SELECT s.first_name, s.last_name, s.date_of_birth, tm.highest_mark
    FROM T_STUDENT s, T_TEST_MARKS tm
    ...etc...

    And then later I want to do another query using some of the same fields, I used to retype the field and table names, even though copying and pasting them would be much faster (of course :). I certainly wouldn't keep copying and pasting functions or other "I-want-to-be-in-a-module" types of thingies into several different scripts/programs/whatever you want to call them. After all, that's what modules are for. Not to mention that copying and pasting code (with the idea "hey, this almost does what I want, I'll just c/p it here and make some changes!") is very dangerous. :)

    -- mothra

[reply]
      I have had to do similar stuff before I wrote an perl application to create the SQL from the database directly. Point it at a table (or two) and it creates the select then edit the select. This is probs better than cut/paste. -- Zigster
[reply]

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