7.0 Construction#

Estimated time for this notebook: 5 minutes

Construction#

Software design gets a lot of press (Object orientation, UML, design patterns).

In this session we’re going to look at advice on software construction.

Construction vs Design#

For a given piece of code, there exist several different ways one could write it:

  • Choice of variable names

  • Choice of comments

  • Choice of layout

The consideration of these questions is the area of Software Construction.

Low-level design decisions#

We will also look at some of the lower-level software design decisions in the context of this section:

  • Division of code into subroutines

  • Subroutine access signatures

  • Choice of data structures for readability

Algorithms and structures#

We will not, in discussing construction, be looking at decisions as to how design questions impact performance:

  • Choice of algorithms

  • Choice of data structures for performance

  • Choice of memory layout

We will consider these in a future discussion of performance programming.

Architectural design#

We will not, in this session, be looking at the large-scale questions of how program components interact, the stategic choices that govern how software behaves at the large scale:

  • Where do objects get made?

  • Which objects own or access other objects?

  • How can I hide complexity in one part of the code from other parts of the code?

We will consider these in a future session.

Construction#

So, we’ve excluded most of the exciting topics. What’s left is the bricks and mortar of software: how letters and symbols are used to build code which is readable.

Literate programming#

In literature, books are enjoyable for different reasons:

  • The beauty of stories

  • The beauty of plots

  • The beauty of characters

  • The beauty of paragraphs

  • The beauty of sentences

  • The beauty of words

Software has beauty at these levels too: stories and characters correspond to architecture and object design, plots corresponds to algorithms, but the rhythm of sentences and the choice of words corresponds to software construction.

Programming for humans#

  • Remember you’re programming for humans as well as computers

  • A program is the best, most rigorous way to describe an algorithm

  • Code should be pleasant to read, a form of scholarly communication

Read Steve McConnell’s Code Complete.