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Re: Inspiration comes to the inspirable?

by mstone (Deacon)
on Jul 23, 2002 at 23:51 UTC ( [id://184649]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to Inspiration comes to the inspirable?

Go back and reread some of your old code.

Look for places where the code is annoyingly intricate, and ask yourself, "what does this code do?" I don't mean "what are the steps of this process?" I mean "what is this code responsible for?" or "what problem does this code actually solve?" Code often becomes complicated because you're trying to solve the wrong problem.

Case in point, though this comes from the world of engineering: when the US space program first started, the astronauts had problems writing reports in space, because the standard ball-point pen relies on gravity to push the ink into contact with the ball. So the engineers of the space program invented a pen with a pressurized ink cartridge. Then they had to find ways to keep the ink from squirting out when it wasn't supposed to. In the end, they had a device that relied on an intricate and elegant balance of mechanics and chemistry.

The Russians, OTOH, just used a pencil.

The US engineers did a great deal of work to solve the problem "how do we make a pen operate in zero-G?" The Russians spent two seconds finding an alternate solution to "how do we make marks on paper?"

Inspiration is the art of finding the right problem to solve. To do that, you have to look at your solutions and decide what problems they actually solve.

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