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Comment by j2d2 | Hacker News Reader

Hmm... It's amusing to me that spartan programming has a name like this. To me, it's simply about efficiently using resources. I am reminded of the time I asked Miguel de Icaza about design patterns. He said he never saw the point of having them in a book because people would just invent them when they needed them.

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I agree, this could have been described as good programming. :)

There's a quote by a well-known author whose name I cannot recall at the moment, concluding a lengthy letter: "Forgive me for writing such a long letter, I did not have time to make it brief."

One of the reasons that I've almost invariably been more productive than most other coders I've worked with is that I write a lot less code than they do. Another side effect of that is that my code has never been a bottleneck, so I've never had to do any further optimization.

It also takes significantly less time to debug :)

"I have made this letter longer than usual, because I lack the time to make it short" - Blaise Pascal (French mathematician)

A point for having design patterns in a book is that everyone can use the same names for the same patterns. That helps somewhat in communication.

I'm not convinced patterns are that complicated.

They are not complicated. They are common - that's the whole thing behind them. They are so common that it's useful to use same names to talk about them because you will see them over and over in the code of different persons. And certainly defining them exactly and having good implementation examples might also occasionally help a programmer as we're not all perfect ;-)

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