Re-implementing Gloves
“Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.” —Henry Spencer
The Daily WTF is one of those computer humor sites that pokes fun at coders who seem not to understand development. It’s sometimes good for a laugh , but mostly full of people implementing ‘isTrue()’ functions in C# or stories of massive VBA scripts running mission-critical systems. However, it recently ran an article that strikes at the heart of one of the universal developer tendencies: The Complicator’s Gloves .
To summarize the article, someone on a developer forum complains of having cold hands from biking, and suggests that bikes should have heated handlebar grips. This triggers a discussion of possible implementations of a wire mesh system powered by a battery that is charged by a dynamo in the pedals, which begins to spiral out of control, culminating in a design that (ignoring the bike) consists of water heated by the torso under the jacket and delivered to the extremeties by a series of one-way tubes .
Finally, someone ends the discussion with some out-of-the-box thinking: just buy a pair of gloves.
The Daily WTF usually highlights obvious mistakes made by incompetent coders, but this is something that everyone reading this has probably done. Hackers love complicated solutions, and will often over-engineer solutions to problems that never needed solutions. We (and that’s not the editorial ‘we’. I mean you, too.) love tinkering, endlessly adjusting, adding capabilities that no one asked for or will ever need. Sometimes you come up with something brilliant, and sometimes you re-implement gloves—poorly.
Not that this tendency is bad. It’s important to exercise your creativity when you can get the chance; the actual danger is that those unfortunate coders didn’t realize they were re-implementing gloves. I’ve done it, you’ve done it, and everyone you know who has written software has done it. You write ‘i = 5’, frown at it, define it as a constant (taking time to carefully name the constant), decide to stuff ‘5’ in a config file and allow the user to override the config file with an environment variable, furrow your brow at that, get rid of the file and stuff the 5 into a MySQL database, change that so it will run on Postgres, too, write an abstraction layer so you can use a database /or/ a flat file, and you’ve successfully spent four hours on a for loop.
So, obviously, if you had realized what was going on and just left it at ‘i = 5’, you’d have been able to put that energy into the hard part of the problem. A lot of the small projects I’ve done for fun died a similar death, and a lot of time I’ve wasted at work has gone towards over-engineering. It’s important to stop once in a while and make sure you’re not re-implementing gloves.
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