In my experience, most applications are a mess. It's not that you disagree that it would be a good thing to have frugal code, it's that the applications that you work on are so far removed from this ideal that you despair of ever reaching it. I suspect that you already believe everything stated in the prior paragraph. I suspect, however, that I'm preaching to the choir. it would be simple, correct, and without embellishment. The easiest code for subsequent readers to understand would be frugal, i.e. It follows that you can reduce overall costs by optimizing code for reading rather than writing. Anyone who ever looks at a piece of code has to invest brain-power into figuring out what it does.ĭead code and speculative cruft make it hard to decipher the intention of code. Writing code costs something, but over time the cost of reading is often higher. I want these things, and am intrigued by the thought that taking half-life into consideration might help me achieve them.Ĭode is read many more times than it is written. Consider the value of having of an application that is free of speculative additions that were thrown in to support features that will never arrive. Think about how much costs would go down if you never had to navigate dead code. Imagine how much better your life would be if your application's code always reflected the most accurate, up-to-date understanding of the problem at hand.
The upsides of a short code half-life are significant. I saw that talk nearly a year ago and have been distracted by its implications ever since. In that talk he tells the story of working on a high quality, non-trivial application whose code's half-life was six weeks. In his Software that Fits in Your Head talk, Dan North defines the half-life of software as (I'm paraphrasing) "the amount of time required for half of an application's code to change so much that it becomes unrecognizable." I've been thinking about the half-life of code. P.This post originally appeared in my Chainline Newsletter. You can find the read me with more detail inside the release folder. I really hope all of us can start modding for SMOD again and bring back the old days.
Please provide feedback on bugs and features, I really need to know Proper documentation of code and features will be released sometime in the future but for now, just have fun! This could mean daily, or a week in between. I post updates whenever I worked on something. The mod was coded from ground up without reference to other SMOD source codes (so expect lotsa bugs). This mod is made as a hobby and at the same time I'm learning how to code Source. If you haven't been tracking my progress at, you can do so there. This is the first of many releases to hopefully bring back SMOD on Source SDK 2013. Welcome to SMOD 2013: Brutal Half-Life 2!
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