Carter’s Compass: I know I’m on the right track when by deleting code I’m adding functionality.

For some reason, some of them get hung up on the quantity (read: number of lines of code). But, by doing that, I’m afraid they are completely missing the boat.

It’s a known phenomenon.

This sounds like a bailout answer; however, it’s actually very true. Lesscode is qualified by something that is utterly satisfying, yet no one can put their finger on it.

This is a bailout answer, because you aren’t even trying to at least describe it, en lieu of putting your finger on it. :-) But I think Mike Champion had a decent stab at it.

This is in sharp contrast to what a lot of people outside of the discipline will tell you (e.g. marketing, management, tech press, analyst firms, etc.) and perhaps that is responsible for putting us off the track.

Back in the day, when I used to write magazine columns, we used to joke about a particular school of calendar-based journalism - “If this is January, it must be disk storage” - one of the more popular column topics was software bloat, and usually more specifically, M$’s need to add new features to Office in order to persuade them to upgrade every year.

I think perhaps that the “je’n sais quois” of lescode is actually ‘refinement versus expansion’, or as Oxford has it:

refinement |riˈfīnmənt| noun the process of removing impurities or unwanted elements from a substance : the refinement of uranium. • the improvement or clarification of something by the making of small changes : this gross figure needs considerable refinement | recent refinements to production techniques. • cultured elegance in behavior or manner : her carefully cultivated veneer of refinement. • sophisticated and superior good taste : the refinement of Hellenistic art.

vs.

expansion |ikˈspan sh ən| noun the action of becoming larger or more extensive : the rapid expansion of suburban Washington | a small expansion of industry. • extension of a state’s territory by encroaching on that of other nations, pursued as a political strategy : German expansion in the 1930s. • a thing formed by the enlargement, broadening, or development of something : the book is an expansion of a lecture given last year. • the increase in the volume of fuel on combustion in the cylinder of an engine, or the piston stroke in which this occurs. ORIGIN early 17th cent.: from late Latin expansion-, from Latin expandere (see expand ).

Just a thought.

Hmm, the trouble is that writing code is a diminishing percentage of what it takes to actually ship commercial quality software. Or more precisely, writing test code and documentation is an increasing percentage of what it takes to ship software of acceptable quality these days. That’s not to say that coding can be done by trained monkeys. To me it means that as much as we as programmers might value simplicity over the other “ilities”, we as commercial software developers have to value security, reliability, etc. more highly, even though (at the current state of the art) all those *&^%$ checks to filter input and validate output tends to make code uglier, more complex, etc.

I believe it fell out when we started calling programmers “developers” and started viewing the writing of code as the smallest piece of building software, something trained monkeys could do if everything else was done properly.

VB is not what it once was.

And, given the LINQ stuff, hopefully soon it won’t be what it once is!

client-servant or client-savant…

regarding the lesscode mindset, i would say a commitment to modularity is inherent. thus lesscode, because you don’t have to swallow the whole damn ball of toenails.

I hope it’s not just an “omygod, the damned VISUAL BASIC people are stealing our meme!” reaction from y’all :-)

It’s quite likely many of the contributers here were “VISUAL BASIC people” at one time or another. VB is not what it once was.

If I had to pick a defining trait for the lesscode mindset, it would be that you are forced to consider simplicity above all the other ilities. It’s throwing your hands up in the air in the realization that you can have perfect scalability, reliability, extensibility, generality, modifiability, etc. and it means fuck-all if the design does not meet a basic level of simplicity and understandability.

This is in sharp contrast to what a lot of people outside of the discipline will tell you (e.g. marketing, management, tech press, analyst firms, etc.) and perhaps that is responsible for putting us off the track.

I get the feeling from reading various early computing literature (SICP, IETF works, Peter Gabriel, etc.) that this was once a well understood aspect of software design. At some point it fell out of the discipline or was pushed down the priority list. lesscode is all about making simplicity cool again - it requires accepting that we’ve made a huge mistake in allowing our ambitions to get ahead of our discipline and then trying to do something about it.

I think I know now why my initial impressions of MonoRail weren’t very good. While they were adhering to the letter of the Ruby On Rails ideas, they weren’t really getting with the spirit. And example would be the MonoRail…