Keep your code simple, Wirth style

On keeping your code simple (because you know you only write it once, but you maintain it for the rest of your life), there’s a funny story in The School of Niklaus Wirth: The Art of Simplicity By László Böszörményi

I still vividly remember the day that Wirth decided to replace the elegant data structure used in the compiler’s symbol table handler by a mundane linear list. In the original compiler, the objects in the symbol table had been sorted in a tree data structure (in identifier lexical order) for fast access, with a separate linear list representing their declaration order. One day Wirth decided that there really weren’t enough objects in a typical scope to make the sorted tree cost-effective. All of us Ph.D. students were horrified: it had taken time to implement the sorted tree, the solution was elegant, and it worked well – so why would one want to throw it away and replace it by something simpler, and even worse, something as prosaic as a linear list? But of course, Wirth was right, and the simplified compiler was both smaller and faster than its predecessor.

This is what it really means to be an engineer: test a hypotesis, discover is not cost effective and without ego, remove it to have something simpler.