Schlemiel the Painter's algorithm: Difference between revisions

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Revision as of 19:52, 10 February 2011

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The inefficiency to which Spolsky was drawing an analogy was the poor programming practice of repeated [[concatenation]] of [[C (programming language)|C]]-style [[Null character|null]]-terminated character arrays (that is, [[String (computer science)|strings]]) in which the position of the destination string has to be recomputed from the beginning of the string each time because it is not carried over from a previous concatenation.

Spolsky condemned such inefficiencies as typical for programmers who had not been taught basic programming techniques before they began programming using higher level languages: "Generations of graduates are descending on us and creating ''ShlemielSchlemiel 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" />

Spolsky's essays have been cited as examples of good writing "about their insular world in a way that wins the respect of their colleagues and the attention of outsiders."<ref>{{citation|last=Rosenberg|first=Scott|title=The Shlemiel way of software|date=December 9, 2004|url=http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2004/12/09/spolsky/|publisher=salon.com}}.</ref>