Coding Koan: the power of one

'Joseph Cooney' on Thu, 15 May 2008 10:07:57 GMT, sez:

only half a line if you write it in ruby but the performance...sheesh!

15 lines of XSLT

only half a line in perl, but you only get to use 2 consonants and a vowel, the other characters are punctuation

1 line of C, which every other language proclaims themselves to be "as fast, or faster than"

1.5 lines of python because of syntactic white-space

1 line in powerpoint...a big fluffy cloud with the text "then a miracle occurs" inside

'Don2' on Thu, 15 May 2008 10:15:21 GMT, sez:

Given a sufficiently pattern-inspired framework any line of code can become 57 classes, 3 xml files and 6 consultants full time for a year.

'Nolo' on Thu, 15 May 2008 10:19:47 GMT, sez:

1 liner:

"Dear shanselman, please write my code for me."

'Simon' on Thu, 15 May 2008 10:36:44 GMT, sez:

For any given one-line application built on a sufficiently large framework, the unit testing and mocking becomes quite hard.

'Josh Bush' on Thu, 15 May 2008 11:24:17 GMT, sez:

By framework, you mean Google, right? I think any programming task can be solved in one line by opening up your browser and searching for "c#" + problem you are trying to solve, then copy and pasting.

Josh

BTW, nice CAPTCHA (meatbag)

'Waterbreath' on Thu, 15 May 2008 11:48:27 GMT, sez:

Sounds disconcertingly similar to the "OOPian ideal" of code reuse: writing an app by calling a single method on an instance of the appropriate class.

In reality, code reuse never works out so conveniently.

'Waterbreath' on Thu, 15 May 2008 11:48:27 GMT, sez:

Sounds disconcertingly similar to the "OOPian ideal" of code reuse: writing an app by calling a single method on an instance of the appropriate class.

In reality, code reuse never works out so conveniently.

'haacked' on Thu, 15 May 2008 14:09:52 GMT, sez:

Of course, such a large framework that allows one line applications is probably a framework for building that particular application.

Then again, with C# and .NET, any app can be one line.

public class Foo {public static void Main(){Console.WriteLine("Just don't add line breaks!")}}

'Eber Irigoyen' on Thu, 15 May 2008 14:10:27 GMT, sez:

cof*ruby*cof*

very true indeed

'mike' on Thu, 15 May 2008 14:54:20 GMT, sez:

Also, you can really cut down on the documentation requirements.

'Ryan Smith' on Thu, 15 May 2008 16:07:30 GMT, sez:

I like to write lots of unnecessary lines. That way I feel like I got more work done.

'Paul Kohler' on Thu, 15 May 2008 19:34:23 GMT, sez:

Oh I agree, but it would need a fluent interface:

AppFactory.Gui.MdiStyle.MainForm.AddMenu("File").AddItem("New").......DoLoggingToo.Show();

Granted, that could get long.

PK :)

'OJ' on Thu, 15 May 2008 19:52:33 GMT, sez:

@Eber - I'm with you. Just have to look at the "one-line JSON parser" in Ruby. Horrid.

'lb' on Thu, 15 May 2008 20:43:21 GMT, sez:

(this koan has been twittered by jeff 'coding stack fake plastic ex vertigo rock overflow horror' atwood.
http://twitter.com/codinghorror/statuses/812017459
http://twitter.com/codinghorror/statuses/812038224
which probably brought in 6 bazillion hits.

'mmphosis' on Sat, 31 May 2008 22:43:38 GMT, sez:

Reduces to less than nothing...

1 line machete hack: "delete these five words"

name


website (optional)


enter the word:
 

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