[Cialug] SOT: Classic Computer Science trade-offs

[Thomas Kula]

On Fri, May 25, 2012 at 02:00:48PM -0500, Nathan C. Smith wrote:
> 
> Are there other tradeoffs you think about often in whatever work you do?
> 

Cleverness/Optimization vs. Understandability: I absolutely hate it
when people write code to eek out some tiny bit of performance by
being clever that wastes far far more resources in the end because
now every time I look at it my brain hiccups and it takes me 10 seconds
to figure out what the hell you were trying to do. It also seems that
there's a roughly inverse relationship between actually needing
the cleverness and the presence of cleverness.

Which reminds me of the classic Kernighan quote, "Everyone knows 
that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first 
place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, 
how will you ever debug it?"

-- 
Thomas L. Kula | kula at tproa.net | http://kula.tproa.net/