The most important goal in designing software is understandability

Comments

• mdhughes@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  It’s clearly secondary to correctness: A program that is well-written but doesn’t work right is worthless. Many hairy balls of mud have shipped to great acclaim.

  Human readability & comprehension is nice for maintenance, but you don’t get to maintain something that never worked right to begin with.

  … Of course, Windows is existence proof that you can be successful with neither.

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  • eager_eagle@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    the point the post makes is that one can’t write a piece of code that is correct without understanding it in the first place.

    It’s most important, above these, because you cannot ensure any of these other design goals without understandability. It has to come first.

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  • ursakhiin@beehaw.org ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    A program that works right but doesn’t solve the problem is also not very useful.

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• 0xCAFE@feddit.de ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Too often, you won’t be given time to make your software understandable. Probably almost never. So you have to incorporate a way of programming that leaves your code more understandable after you fixed your bug or added your feature.

  I don’t know if understandability si the most important thing. However I certainly agree with the author that it’s curcial, if you ever want to do more than merley a script or a proof of concept.

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  • HamsterRage@lemmy.ca ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    So write it properly from the get-go. You can get 90% of the way by naming things properly and following the Single Responsibility Principle.

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• mvirts@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  The most important part of part of programming is learning to understand software

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