97 Things Every Programmer Should Know

Chapter 56. Make the Invisible More Visible

Jon Jagger

MANY ASPECTS OF INVISIBILITY are rightly lauded as software principles to uphold. Our terminology is rich in invisibility metaphors—mechanism transparency and information hiding, to name but two. Software and the process of developing it can be, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, mostly invisible:

• Source code has no innate presence, no innate behavior, and doesn’t obey the laws of physics. It’s visible when you load it into an editor, but close the editor and it’s gone. Think about it too long and, like the tree falling down with no one to hear it, you start to wonder if it exists at all.

• A running application has presence and behavior, but reveals nothing of the source code it was built from. Google’s home page is pleasingly minimal; the goings on behind it are surely substantial.

• If you’re 90% done and endlessly stuck trying to debug your way through the last 10%, then you’re not 90% done, are you? Fixing bugs is not making progress. You aren’t paid to debug. Debugging is waste. It’s good to make waste more visible so you can see it for what it is and start thinking about trying not to create it in the first place.

• If your project is apparently on track, and one week later it’s six months late, you have problems—the biggest of which is probably not that it’s six months late, but the invisibility force fields powerful enough to hide six ...