Elegance in Approach

Another form of art in programming is the approach or architectural design. This topic requires strong technical background and experience, but still, designing your architecture requires artistic skills. There are many ways to skin a cat, so is there to design an architecture. Although design patterns help standardize approaches in software programming, decisions have to be made on which patterns to use, more so, to mix and match. Some patterns have similar purpose and overlaps, so choosing the best pattern requires some craftsmanship.

One major factor that affects architecture is the system requirements a.k.a. non-functional requirements, such as reliability, performance, maintainability and others. Having said that, I’m assuming that the functional requirements is already being taken care of and you are aware of what functionalities need to be supported… you’re now asking yourself how it should be supported.

Now, let’s go through some examples. When parsing a string for a certain pattern, do you use standard string operators (e.g. indexOf, substr) or regular expressions? Normally, you’d say regular expression will be easier - more readable and easier to maintain. However, there is a major performance degradation in regular expressions. So, if performance is important, you’d reconsider using indexOf. But then the maintaining such codes will be a nightmare. You might end up implementing your own parsing libraries using standard string operators - this will be a balanced between maintainability and performance. Such is a case of choosing the best approach, all solutions will perform the required functionality… but one will be better in some aspects than the other. Knowing which one works best requires some creativity and mastery. Thereby becoming your masterpiece.

There are so many scenarios that will let you weigh and analyze the different approaches, and there might be no perfect answer, only good answer. In any case, deriving the best possible approach requires some intuition, foresight and creativity. With so many factors to consider in choosing a design, you might as well leave it to your artistic skills to decide.

Many conceive that programming is a science of computational logic but that’s only half the truth. Programming is more than science, it’s an art. If you disagree, then you’re as good as someone fresh out of college - brainwashed on algorithms, computational complexity, and neural networks.

Let’s begin by putting things in proper context. Art, as defined in Wikipedia, is “a particular type of creative production generated by human beings” or in simpler terms “products of human creativity”. Such definition may have convinced you to agree, if not, then you’re likely a geek trying to find for the most efficient solution to the traveling salesman problem for the past 10 years.

Let’s cut the chase. So, what’s the art in programming?

Artistic Codes
There are many forms of art that can be expressed by your source code - and I’m referring to art as an aesthetic and visually stimulating piece - just like Picasso’s paintings or poems from Shakespeare.

Think of your source code as a masterpiece. Indention, comments, newlines, variable naming are your tools. All of these components must be balanced, easy to read, and inspiring.

The simplest form of art in your source code is “indention”. Block statements must be consistently indented thereby, making it easier to understand. Indention must also be equal in spaces - most Java programs are indented by 4 characters. Personally, I felt uneasy and can’t think clearly whenever I see misaligned codes. It just needs to get fixed otherwise, I won’t be able to think on the next steps.

“Comments” is another form of art but this requires a bit more creativity. Putting comments is not just rewriting what’s represented in the code, rather it must relate to a specific purpose. There is no need to describe the algorithm since its already shown in the code, instead explain the purpose of the code. Remember, comments are intended for humans to read so don’t write something in machine language. Here’s a classic example:

//loop the ArrayList
for (int i=0;i

instead try something more meaningful,

//let’s sum up all the values in the list
for (int i=0;i

The proportion of source codes to comments is also an art. If you’re writing more comments than the codes, then chances are the code is not readable and not well written. Unless of course you’re trying to write for efficiency. To illustrate:

// let’s get the middle index
mid = (max+min) >> 1;

While the code above can be easily understood using mid = (max+min)/2, you may want to use the shift operator since it takes less CPU time to shift the memory register than do a division.

The third form of art in your source code is “naming”. Choosing the right name can take a lot of thinking time. The worst variable names are generic x and y. Always use something more meaningful to make your codes more readable. More importantly, make sure the names are representative of its purpose.

For example, what variable name would you assign to “number of records per page”?

• numberRecords. This can be interpreted a total number of records, or record number.
• recordsPage. This can be interpreted are the page number or a list of records, or something else.
• numRecordsPerPage. Might work, but probably too long.
• recordsPerPage. The preferred name.

Again, it’s an art so there are no hard and fast rules how to name variable or method names. But always make sure that the names well represent it’s purpose otherwise, it can get confusing when you start debugging your source codes.