Don Xml's Grok This

	The Essence Of Good Code In my recent Syntactic Sugar presentation I was trying to get to the essence of good code, and come up with something a little more concrete than Code Smell, when I ran across exactly what I was looking for in one of my new favorite bloggers, Wes Dyer, post Immutability, Purity, and Referential Transparency.  That post contains a lot of great material, but the quote "Make it correct, make it clear, make it concise, make it fast. In that order", is a the essence of good code.  So, I added the following  slide and restructured my talk around it. I think it does a pretty good job at explaining the underlying principle of Test Driven and Domain Driven Development.  Wes was talking more about some of the principles of functional programming (which is major bonus points in my book), but I think it applies to all development. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it! Published Monday, March 05, 2007 3:31 PM by donxml Filed under: .Net, Domain Driven Design, LINQ Comment Notification If you would like to receive an email when updates are made to this post, please register here Subscribe to this post's comments using RSS Comments Mike Parker said: Greetings from NJ! Your slide is very striking - it has the right visual impact, but I think its missing the idea of order. The "in that order" part of the quote is very important because many programmers emphasize concise and fast before clear. You could show order by making the boxes different sizes, or creating the illusion that they are receding into the background, or... something else. March 9, 2007 7:49 AM donxml said: Mike, I agree, and have been struggling with adding the "extra dimension" of order.  I tried a couple of things, but most just made the slide overly complex.  I'm sure there is a better format, and will keep trying.  Thanks March 9, 2007 9:21 AM

About donxml

I’m an independent consultant, specializing in .Net solutions architecture, based out of New Jersey who also doubles as an evangelist for XML, Domain Driven Design, enterprise architecture and .Net. I do not work for Microsoft, the W3C or any other big company that you may know of (at least not yet). I’ve been an indie for over ten years, and although I’ve been tempted a couple times to take a job with companies like Microsoft, I’ve haven’t found something better than my current situation. I work mostly with the large pharmaceuticals that are based here in New Jersey, and usually find myself on long term contracts. Definitely not the prototypical indie consultant, but it lets me dedicate time to my non-income generating activities like the developer community stuff, plus financing open source projects like XPathmania and MVP-XML. If you would like to talk to me about doing some contract work, just contact me via the contact page. My rates vary widely, depending on lots of different variables, but mostly distance from Jersey, and type of work. Plus, I’ve been known to donate some of my code for various projects.