Programmer Musings

More Programming Practice

I just recently read Valueless Software, written by Chad Fowler wrote about a year ago. In this article, he describes an approach to practicing music by ignoring the result and focusing on the process. He contends that software people might benefit from a similar approach.

I have actually seen this approach used before in C and in Perl. For years, I read the results of the Obfuscated C and Obfuscated Perl contests with amusement and bemusement. I never attempted them, but I found interesting information in trying to understand them.

In Perl programming, I have also seen the practices of one-liners, japhs (Just Another Perl Hacker) and Perl poetry as being ways of playing with the language. Of these, I've only spent much time on one-liners. Recently, I've also seen a new game called Perl Golf, the object of which is to reduce the amount of Perl required to produce exactly the same result.

Over the years, I have heard many people describe each of these practices as horrible. They say these practices teach bad programming and encourage the writing of unreadable code. Interestingly, my experience has shown that many people who were extremely good at these practices also tend to write very clear and elegant code. Sometimes they did use more advanced idioms, but only when the situation warranted it.

Once or twice, I have heard people explain that these contests and games help you get the bad stuff out of your system so you can focus on writing clean code where it matters. But this article from Fowler makes me think about it a little differently. Maybe working on one-liners and obfuscated code contests are just another way of practicing our craft. The output doesn't matter. In fact, you know for certain this output will never be used anywhere else. What matters is the understanding of the language you gain from pushing it further than you thought it could go.

Just as importantly, Fowler's observation also covers the other side of this practice. A novice musician needs to practice much differently than an accomplished musician. The novice needs more structure, and needs to practice doing it right. The master musician understands the basics, but he or she still practices to improve. The more advanced practice focuses on refining things that the novice might not even recognize.

Developing software is similar. A novice programmer learns the wrong lesson from trying to build a one-liner to solve a programming problem. The novice needs to learn how to write clear code that solves the problem at hand. The more accomplished programmer should have learned those lessons already. But, to really understand his/her tools, the accomplished programmer needs to push and practice with the edge cases to really grok how the tool works and how to think about problems and solutions.