Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Steve Yegge has posted yet another of his excellent (and long) rants.  This time he talks about the size of code and why one should jump out of its skin to keep it minimal.

 Most programmers have successfully compartmentalized their beliefs about code base size. Java programmers are unusually severe offenders but are by no means the only ones. In one compartment, they know big code bases are bad. It only takes grade-school arithmetic to appreciate just how bad they can be. If you have a million lines of code, at 50 lines per “page”, that’s 20,000 pages of code. How long would it take you to read a 20,000-page instruction manual? The effort to simply browse the code base and try to discern its overall structure could take weeks or even months, depending on its density. Significant architectural changes could take months or even years.

As I said, it’s a long piece. But it’s worth every paragraph. Even though some Java programmers might be slightly offended by the article, I’m sure it’s not intentional.

In my recent post about Google Reader and Google Talk integration I mentioned that it would be nice to have a possibility to control friends’ names and pictures.  Similar to the way I can do so in Gmail.  Having things a bit more centralized would be nice.

Obviously, Google realizes that.  They are some of the smartest people put together after all. Well, it looks like we’ll have something centralized in the near future.  Web Worker Daily runs a post about Google Profile.  Good news.

And while I was going through that stuff, I had a thought (yes, again).  Google must have some really nice tools for its developers. Usually, companies try to maximize the utilization of available resources, boost code reuse, and minimize time spent on re-implementing things.  Google shown a few decentralized bits over time.  Like this contact management issue, for example.  That probably means that creating something like Google Profile (simple, but very scalable application) has been made extremely easy.  It’s like it is easy to make one rather than to decide if one is really needed and what are the alternatives and how to use those alternatives. That, or they have some a weak approach to code reuse - something that I find hard to believe.  Either way, it’s interesting…