The Wayback Machine ~https//web archive orghneb/20210227084635 /httos//numanreadablemag.com/isves/O/articles/o Frogging Code By Rob Landley In the knitting community, “frogging" means pulling yarn back out to unravel rows of stitches when you spot a problem and need to redo a section, It’s a lovely word, and programming should adopt it. Yesterday I frogged multiple functions when my prototype hit a snag and [ had to change the design. I had the functions working, but they did the wrong thing, so they had to go, My favorite quote from Ken Thompson, the creator of Unix, is “One of my most productive days was throw (000 lines of code Linus Torvalds says a patch that existing, working code often counts as p away Deleting ress: youve learned by itha better way ‘and come uf Corporate management treats ¢ . dollar value to each line and horrified when you get as an investment, attaching rid of any, The fallacy here is called “managing what you measure’: if you don't understand what your employees do very well, but know how much they eam and how much they weigh, you might decide one employee is a good bargain at $80 per pound and another earning $100 per pound should either take a pay cut or gain weight, Joel Spolsky made a good case against frogging code in his article highlighting the value of implicit knowledge in the existing codebase from all the real-world use cases it's adapted to handle, a testing load that cant easily be replicated in the lab, influencing a design that's never fully documented. This is the same sort of good advice for conventional proprietary software development as part of which says larger teams are less efficient because productivity increases linearly but communication costs increase exponentiallyBut open-source development solves both problems by treating code submissions the way print magazines treat theit "slush pile" of unsolicited contributions, Editors read through and reject 99% of them, bouncing a few entries back for revision (‘I can’t use this, hut if you tried changing it this way I give ita second! look.) stitch the hest few together into something vaguely coherent, and publish the next issue. This drastically improves scalability by replacing coordination with a discard/retry loop, and relies on Linus’ Lawy (‘given enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow’) to incorporate end-user feedback into the project's design loop, Its not just bug reporting; in a good open-source project, what the software should do and how it should do it is driven by the needs of the user base, often via the patches they submit to drive the project in a given direction, Frogging code, and lots of it, is fundamental to open source. When Netscape released its source code to the world to create Mozilla, its unwillingness to delete code Jed to the resignation of the project's maintainer. On its way to becoming successful, Mozilla forked off the Galleon project (throwing away 90% of the code) and then forked off Firefox (throwing away 90% more), A proprietary project becoming an open-source project had a lot of moulting to co. So don't worry about ‘creating negative value" when you delete code, Cry "Ribbit? and let slip the frogs of war. a Rob Landley author 15 years ago Rab set out to replace all the cnu packages in Lirux From Scratch with alternatives lke BusyBox. anc soent so much time Logreding BusyBox he wes aopointec rraintairer of that project. Ten years ago he left busybox ard started over wit toyoox, and last year toyox was merged into the Ancrod WM oase operating system, he's currently workirg to turn Andro into 2 developrrert ervirorment capable of building itself under itself. Along the wey he got involved in j-coreore (@ BSD-lcensed open source clean room ciore of the SuperH processor arcritecture mace possiale by expiring patents), spect 2 couple years maintaining the kemel's Dacurrertation cirectory anc kerelorg/coc. Video of him throwing licuid ritrage into a swimming pool (at 2 combination linux expo anc science fictior corventian he'd co-fourcedad) has ose viewed on Youtube 11 million times, a Fauzy Lukman ilstrator Fauzy Lukman is a multicisciplinary designer based ir Indonesia who work on graphic, brancing illustration arc lso LI for Wed & Nobile 2op. Check Fis portfolio or Behance and dribble, Enjoyed reading this article? Consider... Supporting us Receive «© Access to original high quality content «Priority support and feedback «© Athank you for supporting our small independant publcatiorurchased issve? Login or Continue reading by Jonathan Hoceara Template type deduction can cause isgues, like when you need to change keys of a map or gel, Bul there is a heat way to avoid type deduction using type_identity. Qur question for you is how to clearly signal this usage in he code,