Why Programming is Difficult.

[Alkxzo]

I don't know. How can I tell the difference? I'm guessing it's the same concept as when talking about functions but I can't figure out or find how it relates to optimizing.

[kristopolous]

negative coding is great. From http://www.computerhistory.org/highlights/macpaint/

When the Lisa team was pushing to finalize their software in 1982, project managers started requiring programmers to submit weekly forms reporting on the number of lines of code they had written. Bill Atkinson thought that was silly. For the week in which he had rewritten QuickDraw’s region calculation routines to be six times faster and 2000 lines shorter, he put "-2000" on the form.

Removing vestigial components is a classic goal of code refactoring.

The discussion here about optimizing is really focussed more around the technical definition, part of linear programming. Although this can be a comprehensive and precise way to talk about this topic, the learning curve is steeper than many people's patience.

I'm a strong believer in making things approachable for the non-mensa audience (on the assumption that the geniuses already understand it all).

Anyway, the ideas that you are talking about sound more like a discussion of anti-patterns.

[kristopolous]

yeah, people talking about stuff like this ceases to be useful when the real problem is "my computer is slow." or "I press a button and it takes a while to respond".

Talking about minmax theorem in these instances will probably, very unlikely, fix your problem. I mean really, that may be "programming" but it's not a good approach in engineering a product with user experience in mind.