I can't seem to find it now, but I remember reading an essay, probably by Joel Spolsky -- on mentoring a newly hired junior Cprogrammer. The programmer had implemented some functionality in C, and had written lots of tiny function calls, with descriptive names, that composed to form the solution. The author called the programmer into the office, and berated the coding style, citing "efficiency" as a reason for why the program was an example of poor coding style.
The main point of the article, was that the junior programmer was right: well structured, self-documenting code is always better than fast code. If it ends up being too slow, and (in the case of C) can't be fixed with "inline" and "-O2", then, and only then, move towards a different, hopefully more efficient solution.
Now, obviously, writing functional-style C isn't the only (or perhaps even the best) way of writing structural, clean, C code.
But functional composition, especially with help from the underlying programming language, can be compact, and very easy to reason about.
Never mind the fact that approximately half of Haskell (and some clojure?) programmers appear to think that "f a b" is more readable than "scaleVector Vector Factor". Conciseness can be a weakness as well as a strength.
Comments
I can't seem to find it now, but I remember reading an essay, probably by Joel Spolsky -- on mentoring a newly hired junior Cprogrammer. The programmer had implemented some functionality in C, and had written lots of tiny function calls, with descriptive names, that composed to form the solution. The author called the programmer into the office, and berated the coding style, citing "efficiency" as a reason for why the program was an example of poor coding style.
The main point of the article, was that the junior programmer was right: well structured, self-documenting code is always better than fast code. If it ends up being too slow, and (in the case of C) can't be fixed with "inline" and "-O2", then, and only then, move towards a different, hopefully more efficient solution.
Now, obviously, writing functional-style C isn't the only (or perhaps even the best) way of writing structural, clean, C code.
But functional composition, especially with help from the underlying programming language, can be compact, and very easy to reason about.
Never mind the fact that approximately half of Haskell (and some clojure?) programmers appear to think that "f a b" is more readable than "scaleVector Vector Factor". Conciseness can be a weakness as well as a strength.