Code Simplicity

So, there’s a lot of talk on the Internet about privacy. Some people say that privacy is only desired by those who have something to hide. Some people insist that privacy is a human right that should never be violated without consent.

There’s only one problem with this whole debate: what is privacy, and why would anybody want it? This is rarely defined–most people just seem to assume that “everybody knows” that privacy is, so why would it have to be explained?

Well, I’m not a big fan of “everybody knows.” And in fact, it turns out that privacy actually means two different things, which many people use interchangeably without specifying what they’re actually talking about. So to help clear up some of the debate online, and to hopefully shed some light on how it can all be resolved, here are some clear definitions and discussions of what privacy is, and why people would want it.

Privacy of Space

The first type of privacy is “privacy of space”. (Read More…)

A long time ago, I wrote an essay called “Why Computers Suck” (it was given the title “Computers” and “What’s Wrong With Computers” in two later revisions, and the original title never saw the light of day). The article was fairly long, but it basically came down to the idea that computers suck because programmers create crazy complicated stuff that nobody else can understand, and complexity builds on complexity until every aspect of a program becomes unmanageable.

What I didn’t know at the time was why programmers did this. It was obvious that they did do it, but why would the software development industry produce so many crazy, complex masses of unreadable code? Why did it keep happening, even when developers should have learned their lesson after their first bad experience? What was it that made programmers not just make bad code, but keep on making bad code?

Well, this was a mystery, but I didn’t worry too much about it at first. Just the revelation that “bad programs are caused entirely by bad programmers”, as simple and obvious as it may seem, was enough to fuel an entire investigation and study into the field of programming, one which had some pretty good results (that’s mostly what I’ve written about on this blog, and it’s also the subject of a book that’s in development). The problem had been defined (bad programmers who create complexity), it seemingly had a solution (describe laws of software design that would prevent this), and that was enough for me.

But it still baffled me that the world’s universities, technical schools, and training programs could turn out such terrible programmers, even with all of the decades of advancement in software development techniques. Sure, a lot of the principles of software design hadn’t been codified, but a lot of good advice was floating around, a lot of it very common. Even if people hadn’t gone to school, didn’t they read any of this advice?

Well, the truth was beyond my imagination, and it took almost five years of working on the Bugzilla Project with a vast number of separate contributors until one day I suddenly realized an appalling fact:

The vast majority (90% or more) of programmers have absolutely no idea what they are doing.

(Read More…)