Reminds me something that happened to me at CS school : I was in first year, and for some projects, it was third years students who were grading us. And for one project, the third year student grading me said : "your code is too short, I'll take points out for that". I was really shocked. I complained and got a teaher give me back the points, but I'm still shocked someone can consider having a program to be worth less because it has less code - not because it lacked features, or it had bugs, or the code was unreadable (it was C code, so it's easy to make it unreadable by making it too short, but that was not the case, he removed the points before even reading the code).
How can people be so irrational in 3rd year of a CS engineering school (which, in french system, starts after "prepa", so he was in fact 5 years after the end of high school - almost had a master degree) ?
Perhaps they were influenced by other more familiar "student-produced work" scenarios:
An essay can be too short.
On the contrary, essays should also be evaluated on features, bugs, and readability. If you can satisfy all of those criteria with a small number of words, so much the better.
Today's post, Effortless Technique was originally published on 23 December 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Things like the amount of effort put into a project, or the number of lines in a computer program, are positive things to maximize. But this is silly. Surely it is better to accomplish the same task with fewer lines of code.
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was False Laughter, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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