My difficulty is only an — enormous — difficulty of expression - Ludwig Wittgenstein
Programming i.e, building software, for me is about,
- Data
- Make Decisions based on the Data
- Do Actions, typically by Divide and Conquer, based on those Decisions
In fact, doing the above is a part of every day life
eg) ToDo Lists, Appointments, Assessments, Party …
var, if, goto.
Pretty mundane.
Now if you look at a microphone, even there you
find Data and a number of Decisions to make, like what to Record.
You might want noise-cancellation, for example.
The challenges usually lie in scale for software,
i.e, lots and lots and lots of things happening and you
need answers in real-time.
But even before you get into scaling, you face the
Combinatorial Explosion
Explosion ?
Yes !
Let’s say you are writing an addition software,
for adding just two numbers, or at-least that’s what
you heard the client say.
1 + 1
> it compiles !
What About 1 + 1.0 ?
And 1/2 + 1
And 1/5 + 2.2
And “22.9” + 1/2
And “22.8” + 0x12ff
And 1/2 + “1/2356”
And 11.11001100111 + 0.25
And Romanian UTF-14 numbers ?
Maybe next version …
What is more troubling is, now you have a Floating Point bug,
and you are just staring at the screen, *_*, because you finally
realize, it was you who put the explosives, aka Flexibility™, there.
The client wants to add different currencies, by tomorrow btw.
Can engineering knowledge be used to preempt combinatorial explosions?
See Also:
1] Feature Creep