2005-02-18 #1

No-Code School

Programmers should not be measured on how many lines of code they can write, but rather, on how many they can avoid writing. (Unfortunately we have a bias towards to former as it is much easier to measure.) Programming should be a programmer's last resort.

The use of flexible designs, code generation, and the adoption of a large library of pre-written code (both internally and externally supplied) are examples of how to avoid writing code. Within the scope of team programming, delegation is another. So is avoiding unnecessary optimizations. I see people optimizing code all of the time which only counts for less than 1% of their system's performance. You need to know what is worth optimizing and what isn't. At an even higher level, some features just don't make sense to implement so if you can go back to whoever requested them and talk them out of it, then that is better than the best implementation.

Increasing tactical performance is relatively limited. The best programmers in the world are only about five to ten (very rare) times faster than the average. The most dedicated programmer can only work about two to two and a half times as long as the average (ignoring diminishing returns). Getting a competitive advantage through long hours and fast programming alone, is a very difficult proposition with finite limits. Increasing strategic performance on the other hand, by not writing code, is unbounded.

This isn't to say that you don't need to be a good programmer, just that the larger-scale strategic components of software development can have a much larger impact on your effectiveness than small-scale programming ability. What really matters isn't how quickly you can program a method, class, or even an entire application, but rather how quickly you can provide the functionality of many methods, classes, and applications. The role of more strategic rather than tactical programming is to realize economies of scale across your whole body of work so that you can win wars rather than just battles.

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In medieval Japan, Bushido warriors belonged to certain schools or levels of swordsmanship. The highest level was called the "No-Sword School" and was reserved for the finest of swordsmen who through reputation or strategy could win battles without actually having to use their swords. What we need is the "No-Code School"* of programming.

* Well, the point isn't really to write "no-code", but to write "less-code" and even then, it isn't really to write "less-code", but "less-code per feature" or perhaps to keep the code output the same but have "more features per code".