Programmers by nature are problem solvers, clients come to the table with a problem, and its our job to tell the computer how to solve it. Unfortunately I’ve discovered that all too often the first solution to a problem becomes the only solution, as humans we are inheritantly lazy when it comes to problem solving.
In our everyday lives we “wing” it quite alot, never really stopping to question the way we problem solve, as long as it gets the job done. If in unfamiliar territory and we get lost, we try another route, if that doesn’t work we try another, and so on. How many easier would it have been to plan a route in the first place?
Unfortunately when you are developing a piece of software, for alot of developers the same seems to be true. We don’t pause to think of the different ways to skin a particular programming cat, the age old “if it works, it works” rings out, and when the five o’clock bell rings for home time, we pat ourselves on the back and say good job. Even if we break down the smaller tasks inside the bigger ones and analyse them, such is the ways of programming languages – there can be tons of alternative solutions that would work – but are never investigated for the sake of time saving, or that it just wouldn’t be practical to spend a decent amount of time looking at the options.
How much better would certain pieces of software be – if we all had an infinite amount of time to study our own methods properly?
I do my best never to settle for the first solution that comes along, and for that reason, i’ve discovered language methods and commands that I didn’t know existed, and I’m a better developer for doing so. It’s the reason that code reviews work so well in programming teams. So my challenge to you guys, is that if you write code of any shape or form, if you can – do your best never to settle for whatever just works.
