Comments on: Readability is the real (re)usability

By: Carlo Pecchia

Carlo Pecchia — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 13:01:03 +0000

You’ve got the point… but we can “generalize” a little simply saying that: CODE QUALITY matters.

By: Robert MacLean

Robert MacLean — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 05:52:34 +0000

When you think of optimisation, the best place is to optimise the most used areas. When it comes to coding you write it once, but you read it many times. Readability is not just for reuse but an optimisation technique too.

By: Aslam

Aslam — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 22:14:23 +0000

@Niclas
The overkill was about the act of making it another method when it will only be called once, and so perceived performance may well have been the second overkill.

I like to think that you should read code and then “click through” if you want the details. Just like when we read web pages, right?

By: Niclas Nilsson

Niclas Nilsson — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 20:34:45 +0000

> ‘The initial reaction from the other developer was “That’s an overkill because you won’t reuse that method”’

Did you get what kind of overkill he was thinking of? Performance, of that you were just wasting time?

> ‘It’s also true that most us were taught in some Programming 101 course that you should create a method, function, procedure only if you are going to call it more than once, otherwise just leave it all inline.’

I’m often amazed that most devs still think what they learned about optimized code a decade or two ago in school (from a teacher who learned it one or two decades earlier and didn’t keep up) is still applicable. And when you ask them if they heard of HotSpot, they say “No. What’s that?”

They optimize by inlining code, and then a few lines down, they loop over collection that hits the database once per iteration. Sigh.

Kind regards
Niclas