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The Best Code is No Code At All

In an age where generating more code, and more code faster, seems to be a goal:

“The Best Code is No Code At All”

This is a quote from Jeff Atwood. He wrote this article about the topic in 2007, and the next year started Stack Overflow. Yes, the Stack Overflow.

Code has the potential for bugs. More of it is more risk. It’s also more to maintain.

This has been a challenge in software engineering for a long time. C++ templates came out (they are code generators), and executable size ballooned. At a lower level, more code means more i-cache misses and evictions. At a higher level, more code means larger edge worker sizes or slower websites from large bundle downloads.

It’s been seventeen years since this quote; do you think it still rings true?

- Karl

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