Programming Is Mostly Thinking (2014)

For both, there is a function to remove an order-line that looks the same. Many people would be tempted at that point, to abstract over pending and paid orders to have both reference the same function, via adding a base class of order, for example, because the code looks the same.

But for a pending order, it means removing an item from the basket, while for the paid for order, it means removing an item due to unavailability. So the code means different things.

Lets then take the system to have evolved further, where now on the paid for order some additional logic should be kicked off when an item is removed. If both pending and paid for orders reference the same function, you have to add conditionals or something, while if each has its own, they can evolve independantly.

And it definitely is disagreement with the parent comment. Sorry to have not elaborated on it in the first place.

"Programming Is Mostly"

(1) making sense out of missing or, as technical writing, badly written documentation

needed to do the

(2) mud wrestling of system management.

Example 1: Had everything else working then needed a connection string or some such between my Visual Basic .NET code and SQL Server. Struggled with (1) and (2) full time for over a week, with frustration rising like a South Pacific volcano getting ready to erupt, finally reached by phone some relatively high executive who was surprised that anything so routine could be so difficult and quickly gave me the secret. Then my work raced ahead, no problems, and all my code worked fine.

Example 2: Wanted a way for occasional, simple, routine file copying between two computers on a LAN (local area network) from both being connected to the same cable modem. Looked at the old "NET SHARE" and "NET USE", encountered mostly unclear, obscure, undefined technical terminology, tried to make sense out of the obscure syntax diagrams, observed that apparently nearly none of the many combinations of claimed options actually worked, and eventually, from two weeks of full time work, like throwing mud against a wall to see what would stick, underhand, back spin, side arm, etc., did a lot of guessing about what could be wrong and why (mostly involving computer security), discovered that likely computer A might be able to initiate a read from computer B but no way could computer B initiate a write to computer A, etc., got somethings working, but still need to document the effort.

More problems on the horizon ahead:

Problem 1: How to have on one computer at least two instances of the operating system on separate (bootable) hard disks and be able routinely (a) to back-up to additional internal and/or external hard disks all of the installed instances or restore from those backups and (b) recover quickly in case any hard disk fails or any bootable instance becomes corrupted.

Problem 2: How to install PostGreSQL on Windows 7 Professional and/or Windows Server 2019 and get code in Visual Basic .NET to use PostGreSQL. Is there some good documentation?????? Will be thrilled to learn that in this case there is no problem!!!

Once (1) and (2) are out of the way and, as results, the basic tools are working, the APIs (application programming interfaces) are well documented, then the syntax and semantics of the programming languages are easy and the programming itself is the easy, short, sweet dessert after all the nonsense before. The heap data structure, B+-trees, key-value stores, the .NET platform invoke, matrix inversion and eigenvalues, the Gleason bound, .NET managed memory, semiphores for controlling multiple threads, base64 encoding, HTML, etc. -- all really simple, fast, easy. (1) and (2) -- well over 70% of the effort.

I don't mean producing cryptic code-golf-style code, but the aspect that all the stuff you produce you have to maintain. This is certainly different from a novel author who doesn't care so much about maintenance and is probably more concerned about the emotions that his text is producing.