Connecting Design with Code

Jon Bentley wrote his thesis on divide-and-conquer algorithms and came to greatly admire C.A.R. Hoare\´s original quicksort algorithm. Yet for years, Bentley "tiptoed around its innermost loop" because he didn\´t understand it (Beautiful Code, O\´Reilly, 2007). It was only after he implemented his own quicksort based on an elegant partitioning scheme for programming Pearls (Addison-Wesley, 1999) that he truly understood the reason for that inner loop. He also trimmed the original bulkier algorithm to a mere dozen tight lines of code. Code clutter and unnecessary complexity can obscure a design. However, connecting design decisions to code won\´t happen unless developers embrace the practice of writing code as if expressing design intent matters.