[bunderbunder]

If anything, it's testing your ability to misdesign computer programs.

I hate working on software that was written to be read by an audience with perfect recall, because, as a human, I just don't have that. Give me code that assumes I have the memory of a goldfish, and can't keep track of anything that isn't right in front of my face.

I'm pretty sure that's what half of Dijkstra's papers were trying to say, weren't they?

[nybblesio]

Agreed and Knuth's Literate Programming. Our industry is caught in the event horizon of the black hole named, "cargo cults".

[bunderbunder]

The black hole that gets me is a love of complicated things. It seems like, given a choice between two different things that are equally capable of solving the problem, 9 out of 10 hairless apes will pick the one that has more switches and knobs.

I haven't tried literate programming, but one of the things that entices me about it is that my instinct says that it's a vaccine against unnecessary complexity. If you can't express it comprehensibly in both English and code, there's likely an easier way to do it.