Foreword
In my first professional programming gig, I was hired to add features to a bug database. This was for the Plant Pathology Department of the University of Minnesota farm campus, so by “bug” I mean actual bugs, for example, aphids, grasshoppers, and caterpillars. The code had been written by an entomologist who’d learned just enough dBase to write his first form and then duplicated it throughout the rest of the application. As I added features, I consolidated as much of the functionality as possible so that bug fixes (code bug fixes) could be applied in a single place, enhancements could be applied in a single place, and so on. It took me all summer, but by the end, I’d doubled the functionality while halving the size of the code.
Many, ...
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