I highly recommend reading the previous article to this one posted (Pragmatism in Programming Proverbs) to get a better understanding of what I am expressing, since "The Essence of Programming" is a sequel to that article. I originally wanted to write the previous article in normal prose article, regarding the topic of "Pragmatism in Programming", however I thought I’d experiment in style by writing in a proverbial style.
> The fact that it happens to execute without bugs and produces the correct output is far less important than the code being readable, comprehensible, and consistent as part of the larger system.
I partially disagree with this. If the code executes without bugs (very rare) and produces the correct output, then that code solves the problem. The next task is to make it readable, comprehensible, and easy to maintain whilst not trying to introduce other bugs.
This article is a good overview of the idea I am trying to express in this reply. It's very important to get things working BUT then actually improve it, don't just stop there!
I highly recommend reading the previous article to this one posted (Pragmatism in Programming Proverbs) to get a better understanding of what I am expressing, since "The Essence of Programming" is a sequel to that article. I originally wanted to write the previous article in normal prose article, regarding the topic of "Pragmatism in Programming", however I thought I’d experiment in style by writing in a proverbial style.
> The fact that it happens to execute without bugs and produces the correct output is far less important than the code being readable, comprehensible, and consistent as part of the larger system.
I partially disagree with this. If the code executes without bugs (very rare) and produces the correct output, then that code solves the problem. The next task is to make it readable, comprehensible, and easy to maintain whilst not trying to introduce other bugs.
I recommend reading Casey Muratori's article on "Semantic Compression" https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0015
This article is a good overview of the idea I am trying to express in this reply. It's very important to get things working BUT then actually improve it, don't just stop there!