Renaissance Programming/Tenets 2.3

  • The program is the BEST at what it does
  • The program is FAST
  • The footprint is SMALL
  • The code is CLEAR
  • The program is BUG-FREE
  • Abstractions must SIMPLIFY
  • The unnecessary is ELIMINATED
  • The system’s resources are CONSERVED

Derived from Futurist Programming/2.2. I’m dropping the Futurist part as I realized I’m not a Futurist! The Futurists chose to ignore the past, to actively revel in forgetting it, while populating the Earth with explosive, mad, new forms in the spirit of incessant and tumultuous progress.

Ignoring the past means repeating its mistakes as the same roads are trod and the same lessons re-learned, all the while, naif-like, self-congratulatory exclamations of cleverness are exchanged. The redundancy! The waste! The hubris! The Futurists, lemming-like drove themselves off a cliff; after their brief, promiscuous, and prodigious debut, they self-destructed, none surviving their aesthetic extinction on the front lines of the Great War.

I’m renaming the Tenets “Renaissance Programming”, renaissance meaning rebirth. We should take the lessons, arts, and practices of the past; tear them apart, break them down; synthesize them in a new pattern – add new components, new creativity, new idioms, then refine, distill, refactor, remove the dross, iterate! Until at last the product is born, and that product to be input to the next cycle!

Forsooth, ’tis for the win, huzzah!

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This entry was written by admin, posted on 11 November 2008 at 1:39 am, filed under Code, Prosody. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.
  • admin
    The dominance of mobile devices can't happen fast enough for me. I am dumbstruck now when I hear game programmers say "our responsibility is to use every ounce of power in the machine, if you're not using all of it, you're not competent." Roaring fans and blazing hot GPUs are not a good thing. cf.
    http://meshula.net/wordpress/?p=189. Maximizing value whilst minimizing resource consumption is where it's at.
  • Brian Royal
    Glad to see that there's at least one coder out there with some integrity. I'm tired of seeing crappy VB programs slowly populate the screen buffer (and my memory) with useless garbage.

    Machines have such capability now that, should we use the resources properly, we'd never have to upgrade. Well-coded software and drivers are a godsend, and poorly coded garbage has become the normal state of affairs. It's no wonder the linux crowd has the tight code, as I'm sure they're tired of the bloated MS footprint and ridiculous API, which prompted their move in the first place.

    I'm not going to go into the cathedral/bazaar argument here, but I will say that conscientious, efficient programming becomes more and more rare in the world of windows, and I hope that wherever you find yourself, you're properly appreciated.
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