On The Gulf of Execution and Other Development Principles
Besides object-oriented modularization I’m big on code readability. So the first thing I ideally like to see is readable code because in my experience that flattens out the learning curve and lowers the barrier to entry. The more people doing things and the faster the better the tool/platform/library becomes.
Part and parcel to that is what I’ve now come to learn is essentially called the Gulf of Execution. Take Michael Schwern’s post on LWP::Simple that he made on the Beautiful Code weblog.
Before I had read Michael’s post and the Gulf of Execution principle, in my less refined way, I thought of this as a “layered approach.” It’s simple and fast to get started using something, but you can keep peeling away layers of abstraction as needed to do more advanced and sophisticated things. One simple layer is never sufficient because it fails to heed The Law of Leaky Abstractions.
Of course you can always take any of this too far — balance is another crucial thing I consider. Jon Udell referred to this as being an “extreme anti-extremist.” I try to follow that principle, but in blogging and MT communities that sort of thing doesn’t seem to get you very far sometimes.
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