|
The first rule of programming is indeed "don't program". But that's not because buying off-the-shelf code makes you more productive than writing code yourself. It's because software solutions are usually worse than manual solutions. Here's a typical example, one I just ran into today. For a course, I need to enter some data into some system that stores grades. It doesn't just store grades, though, it tries to calculate grades--by various rules and heuristics, which you are likely to misunderstand. They have written a lot of code for the import process, to, you know, take the burden off the poor teacher, by calculating the grades. Of course, it's such a pain, and so error-prone, the much easier solution would be to just make a spreadsheet containing the grades and upload it, and have the program do nothing but display the results or whatever actually needs to be done. That would remove 95% of the code written for this thing. And make it work better. Another one, which I ran into a few weeks ago. I needed to add a class. The professor needed to approve it. The software was so confusing, the prof couldn't figure it out (he is a world-renowned professor of computer science, BTW). After a couple weeks of this, I finally got a sheet of paper and had him sign it. I brought that sheet to the expert in operating the mysterious System, and that finally got the job done. Some software does obviously help the university run better. Every line of code after that makes it run worse. |
Write code to solve the core problem. Don't write code for the rest unless it's really needed.