Abstract
The moment you start to feel confused, stop coding. When I first assigned the Traveling Salesman Problem to my students.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
In 2003, at ARML, the premier H.S. mathematics competition, the captain of our school’s math team gave his teammates a pep talk before the final round. He said that he had noticed in practice many of his teammates missed problems that they were capable of solving. Why? They had failed to read the problems carefully enough to detect subtle relationships in the given information. His advice was to “read each problem closely before starting to solve it.” Our school won ARML that year.
- 2.
Search the Internet for BDUF (big design up front), RDUF (rough design up front), and “emergent design.” There are significant problems with designing a complex program, without the experience of having written a prototype (scaled-down version) of the same program.
- 3.
The definitions of stubs and mocks vary. Safer is to use the term “fakes.”
- 4.
How bad could the error be? Let \( z=x+y \), where x and y are both non-negative, and \( w=\sqrt{x^2+{y}^2} \) . Then what is the largest \( \raisebox{1ex}{$z$}\!\left/ \!\raisebox{-1ex}{$w$}\right. \)will ever become? The answer is \( \sqrt{2} \).
- 5.
Robert L. Kruse, Data Structures & Program Design, 2nd Ed. (Prentice-Hall, 1987), page 55.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Michael Stueben
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Stueben, M. (2018). Stop Coding. In: Good Habits for Great Coding. Apress, Berkeley, CA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-3459-4_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-3459-4_9
Published:
Publisher Name: Apress, Berkeley, CA
Print ISBN: 978-1-4842-3458-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-4842-3459-4
eBook Packages: Professional and Applied ComputingApress Access BooksProfessional and Applied Computing (R0)