[ANN] Nile 0.9.0

Andreas Raab andreas.raab at gmx.de
Sun Jun 10 22:53:44 UTC 2007


Klaus D. Witzel wrote:
> OTOH I would have a problem when an employee (professional developer) 
> would came to me and would claim that the [partly] optimized form above 
> is not understandable or not maintainable. There are just very, very 
> basic math equations involved and doing subexpression elimination back 
> and forth with any piece of code is the minimum I do expect from a 
> professional developer (no offense, Squeak => doIt *and* have fun :) 
> expecially with a language so simple as Smalltalk :)

It isn't as much the code that I would reject, but rather the fact that 
there isn't a comment explaining the what and why. In other words, there 
is nothing wrong with the code per se, what's wrong is that there isn't 
a comment along the lines of:

   "For speed, hand-optimize the following expression:
      ...
   (and yes, the compiler should take care of it but it doesn't
   and since the XYZ-benchmark has shown this to be a cricital
   piece of our application we really need to do something about it)"

So, as your (theoretical) employer I would indeed come to you and claim 
that the optimized form is not understandable and not maintainable; not 
because of the code but because of the lack of any comment whatsoever.

Cheers,
   - Andreas



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