Cute Programming

An Example

A programmer decided unilaterally to prefix his class names with C<Component>_. For example, CNetwork_Socket.

This forced the IDE to group his classes by component so that all his CNetwork_* classes appeared together, which he liked.

However, it confused his co-workers because nobody else used this convention; everyone else would have used the name Socket.

The result was that when you went looking for Socket, you needed to look for Socket and again for C*_Socket.

CuteProgramming might also be called FalseElegance?. This is code that is highly artful at the expense of being difficult to understand. It overemphasizes elegance and conciseness, using techniques or concepts that are unjustifiably novel, obscure, or complex compared to the task at hand. The archetypical form of CuteProgramming is PerlGolf, although it can be done in any language. CuteProgramming can be difficult to refactor, because the author inevitably will huff that the problem isn't in his code, it's that the rest of the team is too incompetent. Thus, VigorousAndForcefulGroupIntervention? is the only way to correct this problem.

"CuteProgramming" seems to be a cute name for any non-standard programming practice that the author disapproves of.

There was a time when Struts would've been considered CuteProgramming, or perhaps I confuse it with overkill.

This page mirrored in ExtremeProgrammingRoadmap as of April 29, 2006