L'Unix programming contest

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Lest you be Judged

[how would you judge the resulting programs to determine a winner if this were a programming contest?]

A course I took as part of my Master's degree was called Software Quality and attempted to do just that - judging code. It's main tenet was the Coupling/Cohesion (and sometimes Factoring) Criterion. Basically, good code has a low-degree of coupling and a high degree of cohesion. A procedure that requires 20 parameters has a high degree of coupling - and is bad code. A procedure that does 20 different things is a low degree of cohesion - and is bad code.

This is enforced modularity - where modules do one thing, and are called with few parameters. That's good code! And you DID notice that I didn't mention specific programming languages, right?

There are a million subjective criteria for judging code quality - clear and prevalent comments, descriptive variable and function names, etc. There are also other ways to derive metrics from code - "function points" comes to mind here. But nothing that I have seen matches the elegance of the Coupling/Cohesion Criterion . . .

Posted by: Roger Ramjet   Posted on: 09/25/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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