John D. Mitchell's Blog

November 2004 Archives

Is it stew, yet?

Before directing you to an essay on Language Oriented Programming, I want to make one other comment about this particular pumpkin soup. We're eating it today and yet I made it Tuesday night. I learned this at a restaurant I worked in. The chef served "yesterday's soup" instead of "the soup of the day". He said that most people know that soup always tastes better the next day so that's when he serves it. This gets to John Mitchell's Slack post. It would be nice to have the time to work ahead on some project and let it sit. You could then come back to it in a couple of days and have the fresh perspective to improve it before serving.

In XP, one of the benefits of pair programming is the difference of perspectives between the current driver and the copilot. Another refreshing perspective change comes when shifting between the two roles. One of the biggest benefits of test-driven development is the forced change in perspective as you shift back and forth between test writing and code writing.

If you're not working in a pair, you can simulate this yourself by working on a task for awhile and then put it aside and come back to it later.

Obviously, the relatively short granularities on the order of minutes are good for getting some kinds of perspective, it's critical to also sprinkle in the larger granularities of days and weeks. There's nothing like a sleep cycle or three to let your brain disengage consciously but continue percolating on it unconsciously to brew some fresh thinking.

Thanksgiving, Reuse, and Slack

In Leftovers, Dan "Superman" Steinberg brings up the question of how to deal with reuse in this age of agile, lean development.

One trick is to just have a really good memory. Alas, given that most of us are human, that doesn't seem to work too well in practice. :-) Given that we're tool users and creators, we do have some options in helping us remember. A classic is a catalog of index cards -- the post-modern equivalent: a big junkyard of code (and you do, of course, keep *all* of your code in a repository, right?) and a local search engine. Another trick is creating and using an orphaned code wiki -- i.e., if the code is something interesting enough to save, add it to a wiki.

Dan asked "With coding - how do we think of reuse? Are we at a point where we start planning for our code leftovers? XP teaches us not to code for situations we don't yet need, but a customer could have a reusability story." Basically, the question is where does "reuse" fit in with the core computer science notions of necessary and sufficient? IMHO, the missing key is the notion of slack. Is there enough slack in the system to allow it to function reliably and robustly in the face of change? Most developers are exposed to this notion in practice in dealing with performance but slack is crucial in all aspects of software. To continue with Dan's food analogy, the orphaned code wiki, for example, is akin to putting leftovers in the freezer.

Big thanks to Dan for his tireless efforts in making the world a better place.

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