According to music artists, two is better than one. When it comes to designing code that has two parts, this may not be the case. In Max Kanat-Alexander’s article, he explains how he has a personal rule of needing to know how generic his code needs to be. He describes it as if he were designing an audio decoder and started out with supporting WAV files and then later needed to add support for MP3 files. His solution was for what he only needed on its own instead of having to copy and paste the common parts for the format; he emphasizes that “it’s not just two implementations that are bad, but also two locations.” Another rule Kanat-Alexander has for helping this stay consistent is to create code well enough to ensure you would ideally never have to go back and change it if another part of the code has to be modified.

I found this information useful because I believe that developers are always striving to be the most efficient coders they can be. In order to do so, using two of Kanat-Alexander’s methods would help them plan to code more effectively. Just imagine the potential headache of realizing you have to go further back to code you thought was finished and then even further back when you notice a change on top of what you originally needed to make. This will probably affect how I will work in the future as it will make me sit back and think beyond the task at hand. It would allow me to save room for potential add-ons without them crisscrossing, which would allow me to skip out on having to do more rework.

At the end of the article, Kanat-Alexander notes that the reader does not have to take this as a “hard and fast law of the universe” and I appreciate how he tries to help the reader but does not try to push them to do it his way. In terms of the subject, I do not think my thoughts have changed too much as I do want to learn how to code better and I would like to continue finding out about people’s coding structure process.

Article: https://www.codesimplicity.com/post/two-is-too-many/

From the blog CS@Worcester by samanthatran and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.