A Question on the Abundance of Code

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 2901

Posted by srdiamond15
2005-03-06 16:16:30

Less than a year ago I was impressed by the ADM programmers’ ability to compress so many features in a mere megabyte of code. Its size was typical of much simpler two-pane outliners. A program with a comparable outlining feature set but without database functions, NoteMap, is 2.5 MB. Since that time ADM has doubled its size, but its feature list has also burgeoned.

But comments like this in the user group echo mine in tenor if not in specifics: “Trying to add a new topic (e.g. Ctrl-R) doesn’t always work, even when in edit mode, though I haven’t been able to pin down when this does and doesn’t work - I usually have to do this with the menu option.” That is, things fail to work, or error messages pop up, usually harmless but distracting and worry-engendering. You don’t want problems creating a simple child topic in an outliner.

All of which leads me to doubt I was right to praise ADM for compressing code. Although it is praiseworthy to avoid the bloat of inelegant coding, I am wondering whether eliminating bloat could ever afford so radical a compression. BrainStorm would seem to be an elegantly coded program that has FAR fewer features than ADM, and it was only slightly less its size before ADM started really growing code-wise.

Are bugs not often the result of conditions arising for which the code has not taken account? And to take account of all conditions affecting an outcome and to make sure they are coded, doesn’t this expand the code base? When you see a program that has far less code in it than feature set (or its price) seem to warrant, is this a tipoff that the program is bug ridden?

Stephen R. Diamond

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