Grinding the Hard Candy

Artima has this post up today. The topic is how to approach the problem of making code, basically. The poster discusses the "hardest first" versus "easiest first" paradigms. He, imagine that, falls into the hard first class, and lonely.

To me, at least, this mirrors (or is the origin of) the database as RM engine versus brain dead file dump with easier backup. After all, figuring out the Organic Normal Form™ schema is mostly a thinking exercise, not a typing exercise. And folks still wonder why applications are still garbage. They're mostly made by monkeys whaling away at keyboards looking busy and spewing thousands of lines of code per hour. Swell.

I do hope we've not reached the point where it's automatically seen as wrong to stop and think instead of diving straight into writing a test for some "simple" case.