TITLE: Two Snippets, Unrelated?
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: September 21, 2005  8:22 PM
DESC: With my current teaching assignment, discussions of speed and beauty in software development naturally bring to mind Scheme.
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BODY:
<STRONG>First</STRONG>...  A student related this
to me today:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
But after your lecture on mutual recursion yesterday,
[another student] commented to me, "Is it wrong to
think code is beautiful?  Because that's beautiful."
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

It certainly isn't wrong to think code is beautiful.
Code <EM>can</EM> be beautiful.  Read
<A HREF="http://www.paulgraham.com/rootsoflisp.html">
   McCarthy's original Lisp interpreter</A>,
written in Lisp itself.  Study Knuth's TeX program,
or Wirth's Pascal compiler.  Live inside a Smalltalk
image for a while.

I love to discover beautiful code.  It can be
professional code or amateur, open source or
closed.  I've even seen many beautiful programs
written by students, including my own.  Sometimes
a strong student delivers something beautiful as
expected.  Sometimes, a student surprises me by
writing a beautiful program seemingly beyond his
or her means.

The best programmers strive to write beautiful code.
Don't settle for less.

(What is mutual recursion, you ask?  It is a technique
used to process mutually-inductive data types.  See
my paper
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/patterns/recursion.html">
   Roundabout</A>
if you'd like to read more.)

The student who told me the quote above followed
with:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
That says something about the kind of students I'm
associating with.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

... and about the kind of students I have in class.
Working as an academic has its advantages.

<STRONG>Second</STRONG>...  While catching up on
some blog reading this afternoon, I spent some
time at Pragmatic Andy's blog.  One of his essays
was called
<A HREF="http://www.toolshed.com/blog/articles/2005/09/15/what-happens-when-t-approaches-0">
   What happens when <VAR>t</VAR> approaches 0?</A>,
where <VAR>t</VAR> is the time it takes to write
a new application.  Andy claims that this is the
inevitable trend of our discipline and wonders how
it will change the craft of writing software.

I immediately thought of one answer, one of those
unforgettable Kent Beck one-liners.  On a panel at
OOPSLA 1997 in Atlanta, Kent said:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
As speed of development approaches infinity,
reusability becomes irrelevant.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

If you can create a new application in no time flat,
you would never worry about reusing yesterday's
code!

----

Is there a connection between these two snippets?
Because I am teaching a course in programming
languages course this semester, and particularly
a unit on functional programming right now, these
snippets both call to mind the beauty in Scheme.

You may not be able to write networking software
or graphical user interfaces using standard Scheme
"out of the box", but you can capture some elegant
patterns in only a few lines of Scheme code.  And,
because you can express rather complex computations
in only a few lines of code, the speed of development
in Scheme or any similarly powerful language approaches
infinity much faster than does development in Java
or C or Ada.

I do enjoy being able to surround myself with the
possibility of beauty and infinity each day.
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