Code Craft

Toward Good Code

There is a huge difference between code that seems to work,correct code, and good code. M.A. Jackson wrote, “The beginning of wisdom for a software engineer is to recognize the difference between getting a program to work, and getting it right.” ( Jackson 75) There is a difference:

• It is easy to write code that works most of the time. You feed it the usual set of inputs; it gives the usual set of outputs. But give it something surprising, and it might just fall over.

• Correct code won’t fall over. For all possible sets of input, the output will be correct. But usually the set of all possible inputs is ridiculously large and hard to test.

• However, not all correct code is good code—the logic may be hard to follow, the code may be contrived, ...