Schlemiel the Painter's algorithm: Difference between revisions

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Spolsky used a [[Yiddish]] joke to illustrate a certain poor programming practice. In the joke, Schlemiel (also rendered Shlemiel) has a job painting the dotted lines down the middle of a road. Each day, Schlemiel paints less than he painted the day before. When asked how that could possibly be, Schlemiel complains that it is because each day he gets further away from the paint can.<ref name="basics">{{citation|last=Spolsky|first=Joel|title=Back to Basics|date=December 11, 2001|series=Joel on Software|url=http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000319.html|publisher=joelonsoftware.com}}.</ref>

The inefficiency Spolsky was drawing an analogy to was the poor programming practice of repeated [[concatenation]] of [[C (programming language)|C]]-style null terminated character arrays (in general computing parlance known as "[[String (computer science)|strings]]")&mdash;the length of the string has to be recomputed each time because it is not carried over from a previous concatenation.

Spolsky condemned such inefficiencies as typical for programmers that had not been taught basic programming techniques before they were began programming in more abstract languages: "Generations of graduates are descending on us and creating ''Shlemiel The Painter algorithms'' right and left and they don't even realize it, since they fundamentally have no idea that strings are, at a very deep level, difficult."<ref name="basics" />