Bibwild.wordpress.com Website Review

The New Yorker this week has a profile of Google programmer pair Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat anyone it’s probably these guys, who among other things conceived and wrote the original Google Map Reduce implementation–  that includes some comments I find unusually insightful about some aspects of the craft of writing code. I was going to say “for a popular press piece”, but really even programmers talking to each other don’t talk about this sort of thing much. I recommend the article, > management of complex code bases. In her view, the best code is like > a good piece of writing. It needs a carefully realized structure; > every word should do work. Programming this way requires empathy > with readers. It also means seeing code not just as a means to an > end but as an artifact in itself. “The thing I think he is best at > is designing systems,” Craig Silverstein said. “If you’re just > looking at a file of code Sanjay wrote, it’s beautiful in the way > that a well-proportioned sculpture is beautiful.” > …“Some people,” Silverstein said, “their code’s too > loose. One screen of code has very little information on it. > You’re always scrolling back and forth to figure out what’s > going on.” Others write code that’s too dense: “You look at > it, you’re, like, ‘Ugh. I’m not looking forward to reading > this.’ Sanjay has somehow split the middle. You look at his code > and you’re, like, ‘O.K., I can figure this out,’ and, still, > you get a lot on a single page.” Silverstein continued, > “Whenever I want to add new functionality to Sanjay’s code, it > seems like the hooks are already there. I feel like Salieri. I I aspire to write code like this, it’s a large part of what motivates me and challenges me.