Becoming a Better Programmer

Chapter 3. Write Less Code!

A well-used minimum suffices for everything.

Jules Verne, Around the World in Eighty Days

It’s sad, but it’s true: in our modern world there’s just too much code.

I can cope with the fact that my car engine is controlled by a computer. There’s obviously software cooking the food in my microwave. And it wouldn’t surprise me if my genetically modified cucumbers had an embedded microcontroller in them. That’s all fine; it’s not what I’m obsessing about. I’m worried about all of the unnecessary code out there.

There’s simply too much unnecessary code kicking around. Like weeds, these evil lines of code clog up our precious bytes of storage, obfuscate our revision control histories, stubbornly get in the way of our development, and use up precious code space, choking the good code around them.

Why is there so much unnecessary code?

Some people like the sound of their own voice. You’ve met them; you just can’t shut them up. They’re the kind of people you don’t want to get stuck with at parties. Yada yada yada. Other people like their own code too much. They like it so much they write reams of it: { yada->yada.yada(); }.

Or perhaps they’re the programmers with misguided managers who judge progress by how many thousands of lines of code have been written a day.

Writing lots of code does not mean that you’ve written lots of software. Indeed, some code can actually negatively affect the amount of software you have—it gets in the way, causes faults, and reduces ...