Make Two Trips
fab23 writes:
Thomas A. Limoncelli writes in Make Two Trips:
During an interview on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, comedian Larry David explained that his New Year's Resolution was "make two trips" (episode 857, January 8, 2020).
For example, when carrying groceries into the house, it is tempting to carry everything at once, but then you drop the cantaloupe, and now you have to clean up that mess. While it seemed like one trip would have been faster, if you include the time it takes to clean up the mess, it would have been faster to simply make two trips.
[...] This "make two trips" strategy isn't an earth-shattering breakthrough. It won't cure cancer, end world hunger, or fix the climate crisis. However, I have adopted this philosophy, and it has had many benefits.
The immediate benefit is that I am now more likely to have a free hand to open my house door. Pulling keys out of my pocket no longer involves smashing a grocery bag between my chest and the house.
The larger benefit has come from adopting this philosophy in both coding and operations.
The other day, I was adding a feature to some old code. The code reported results of an earlier calculation with various formatting options that could be enabled or disabled.
The code was quite complex because certain options affected the format in ways that had downstream implications for other options. The code was able to satisfy all the various options and controls in one pass over the data, printing a report along the way.
[...] I struggled in earnest to add my new feature to this ever-growing complicated loop.
Then I remembered Larry's advice: Make two trips.
The code would be significantly simpler if it made two passes over the data. One pass would collect data, count things that needed to be counted, sum subtotals, and so on. The second pass would take all this information and output the report, and would be much easier because it had all the information it needed from the start. No Schrodinger's cat.
[...] It was a classic complexity vs. memory engineering decision: Suffer from complexity or suffer from potential memory exhaustion.
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