The Discipline of Software

One of the things I find the most difficult to teach is the discipline to solve exactly the problem that is in front of you, and only that problem. Solve it in the simplest way you can think of. Be confident that in the future if new requirements arise, such as improved performance, you’ll be able to make a “better” implementation to account for the new requirements. Then move on to the next real problem.

I think this is kind of like the joke that if you ask a lawyer if they know the time, they’ll say “Yes”.

Another way to say this might be: Solve real problems, not imaginary ones. It can be difficult to tell the difference. Our brains are equipped with a simulation engine that allows us to imagine things that aren’t really there. Imagine a sparrow with orange stripes. If you don’t suffer from aphantasia then you likely saw exactly what was described. What you might not have noticed is that while you saw the bird, the real world blanked out. The simulation engine takes over our real senses to run its simulation. You can imagine something scary and you will be scared even though it is not real.1 In this same way the problems you think of can feel real. This is an illusion and the way to combat that is to say you’ll only work on problems that have real evidence, a real example, an actual data set, not imagined scenarios.

Ask yourself: “Is this requirement real or is it just a thought?

“Yes, but you only have to implement it once! So you should take the extra time to do a good job!”

That assumes you’ve correctly predicted the future and the code is used exactly the way you thought it would be. If you have this ability and care at all about money, you should be playing the stock market and not writing code for other people. I have learned the hard way that I do not. I’ve implemented complex solutions that took a long time to write only to discover that some requirement I didn’t think of has broken it completely effectively requiring a redesign to handle the new scenario.

This is how I code. I work this way because I’ve discovered that I’m not particularly good at predicting the future. I can imagine all kinds of problems that are not real, they’re just thoughts. Trying to account for all of these imagined problems leads to very complex solutions. Complex solutions are difficult to reason about, difficult to implement correctly, take more time to implement than simpler or more naive solutions. They are more difficult to debug and fragile to changing requirements (the ones you didn’t imagine).

Practically what I’ve found is that sometimes the naive implementation is all you need. It’s sufficient for the problem sizes you’re dealing with, and you saved yourself a ton of time by not implementing something more complicated with better performance. You were able to move on to add more value to the project quickly because you implemented an N^2 algorithm in a hour instead of taking a week to write a much more complex solution. And it was fine. If it isn’t fine, then you’ll know that pretty quickly, and you’ll have actual evidence to justify taking the time to create a more complex implementation. You can point to the real data you’re trying to process and say “this is the reason I need more time”.

I am starting to wonder if this is something that can even be taught. Is this a conclusion one needs to come to on their own? Through their own experiences. After all, that is how I have come to this philosophy.

I have, on several occasions, had more work than I could possibly do under tight deadline. The argument that deadlines are arbitrary falls on deaf ears when you are burning cash and have no product to sell. Working code today is better than perfect code tomorrow. What good is perfectly written code that nobody uses? Nobody uses it either because it wasn’t what they actually needed to solve their problem (you predicted wrong, but spent a long time implementing the wrong thing), or worse your company no longer exists because it blew through all it’s cash before you could make a single sale.

While we could go back and forth about the benefits of a strict adherence to any programming philosophy: Static vs Dynamic, Agile vs Big Design Up Front, Types vs Tests, DDD, CQRS, TDD, etc. One thing I will say is that if you want to get better at this discipline, I think that some amount of Test Driven Development is the best way to practice this.

Notes:
1. The information about the brain’s simulation engine can be found in the book Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert of Harvard University