Dodgy Coder: The Art of Developing Software
"I encourage you to change all your data types to boolean. Whenever there's a data quality issue, it can only be wrong by 1 bit." - Anonymous
The below is taken from an interview conducted at the Computer History Museum in 2004 by Grady Booch. He interviewed early Apple developers Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld about the development of the original Apple Mac, and in particular MacPaint software.
Bill Atkinson: Oh yes, it’s an art form, like any other art form, and it’s not just practical, as in, does it do the job? Is it clean inside, does it look--? I would spend time rewriting whole sections of code to make them more cleanly organized, more clear.
I’m a firm believer that the best way to prevent bugs is to make it so that you can read through the code and understand exactly what it’s doing, that there’s nothing tricky in it, that it’s all very straightforward. And maybe that was a little bit counter to what I ran into when I first came to Apple.
There were a lot of people who prided themselves in how this little piece does something that I can’t for the life of me figure out what it is, but it’s magic that it does it. I would do things like deliberately assign something into a variable, and instead of putting ten operations concatenated onto one line, I’d use intermediate variables so I could understand the purpose of each of these. And I liked it.
