The Pragmatic Programmer: your journey to mastery, 20th Anniversary Edition, 2nd Edition

Topic 30

Transforming Programming

If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing.

W. Edwards Deming, (attr)

All programs transform data, converting an input into an output. And yet when we think about design, we rarely think about creating transformations. Instead we worry about classes and modules, data structures and algorithms, languages and frameworks.

We think that this focus on code often misses the point: we need to get back to thinking of programs as being something that transforms inputs into outputs. When we do, many of the details we previously worried about just evaporate. The structure becomes clearer, the error handling more consistent, and the coupling drops way down.

To start our investigation, ...