winscape 2195

wrote on 10-09-2005 10:58:

It's always interesting to see (beyond issues of 'style') how people tend to (try) and solve problems.

My lab partner in an "Advanced" Electronics clbutt was a gal. She was very precise, very practical, and very smart. She was also very adept socially, dressed nicely, and although not in the supermodel catagory, wasn't bad looking either. When I happened to get a better grade than her on a microcontroller project that we both contributed to, she attributed my success to laziness and procrastination.

She was probably right. Her code (that she spent almost a week working on) for the project tried to be airtight, bulletproof, modular, well-structured, and readable. It also didn't fit into the tiny little 8K EPROM we were using.

My code (that was written on the way to lab that morning) was buggy, sloppy, slow, messy, and unfathomable. It fit into the EPROM just fine. Under the conditions of the test, it worked. With a little bit of refinement, it worked well. Another couple of tweaks and it ran quickly. I burned four or five chips to get the prototype working right. She never got to burn any.

I wish I could say that I had stumbled upon some elegant, concise, solution to our common problem. I hadn't. I took a direct approach to finding a solution that could be implemented quickly, since I had already wasted the time allocated to the task. My motivation was to "turn something in" and her motivation seemed to be "turn in something nice." My code took several iterations to get it "right"; hers never made it into test.

If we were to be evaluated in terms of "lines of code", she beat me hands down. Since the criteria was "lines of working code", I happened to get the better grade.

In this case, I certainly fell into the category of "male idiot." She was a much better programmer who tried to follow all the rules and turn in an elegant solution. I ended up being rewarded for breaking most of the rules and turning in a real kludge.