This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz
by James Britt.
Original Post: The Downside of Clever
Feed Title: James Britt: Ruby Development
Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/JamesBritt-Home
Feed Description: James Britt: Playing with better toys
At todays BarCamp, Derek gave a great preso about [Test|Behavior] Driven Development. The talk included comments and observations on how to ensure that your code is not only correct, but maintainable. He mentioned flog, a Ruby tool that analyzes your code, applies some heuristics, and reports on how baroque and troublesome your code may be.
A high flog score typically means that someone has been too clever for anyone’s good, and it brought to mind a quote from Brian Kernighan (which I first heard about from David Koontz):
Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you’re as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?