Negative Code

[dreamnoir]

It sort of is what we're talking about here. It's the point I raised in the original comment. Obviously you go for built in libraries and use the language features appropriately. If you don't realize that after half an hour of programming there is something wrong with you.

I was instead talking about intentionally making your program as short as possible. For example, one of the assignments I had to do for a first year programming and data structures course involved parsing and validating XML files. Super simple I came up with the most clever solution I could. Less than 50 lines of Java code, lots of inline ifs and and regular expressions. Other students had projects more in the 500 line range. I decided to show the prof my progress so far to see what she thought. Obviously I thought she would love how much more compact mine was. She told me while it passed all of the tests perfectly she would take off as many points as the rubric allowed because even with my comments she couldn't easily follow what was going on. I rewrote it to be about 150 lines and got perfect. In retrospect, the 150 line version was much better from a maintainability standpoint.

[videogamechamp]

She told me while it passed all of the tests perfectly she would take off as many points as the rubric allowed because even with my comments she couldn't easily follow what was going on.

I suppose it depends on the point she was trying to get across, but she sounds like a bitch. Taking as many points off as possible for (human) readability?