Every so many months I look up “X number of things every programmer should know” and do my best to incorporate one of those principles into my coding. There are some standard concepts: modularity, short methods, avoid “spaghetti code, ” understand what your compiler is actually doing, the four years and tens of thousands of dollars you spent on an education is worth nothing. Nothing.

My most recent gem is here. I actually found this article sometime ago and tl;dr-ed it, throwing it into the “Read This” folder. I’m not proud of shelving an article due to its length, nor that I ended the last sentence with a preposition, but that’s just how things went.

In any case, after rediscovering it, two points caught my eye. First, #5: Beauty is in Simplicity. (I’ll save you the trouble of changing tabs.) This section is about writing simple code that‘s also easy to read. Most of my short code is pretty much impossible to understand (kind of like this). Maybe it’s because all my variable names are in Bantu, but still it would be worth learning how to write simple code that another person could understand. New principle identified! That was until I saw #10: Consider the Hardware. According to this, lots of small functions aren’t necessarily the best for machine efficiency. Oh, good. Do I go with small methods for modularity and readability, or giant methods for more efficient execution?

The two aren’t actually exclusive, but they sure seem that way. Continue reading Dr Dre Or How I Decided to Stop Worrying and Learn the Hardware →