Yesterday, I got The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint by Edward Tufte in the mail. I thought a little about my motivations for reading it, thinking that people in general probably don’t want to make an effort to become experts in creating presentations – instead, they want to put that effort into getting better at whatever subject it is that they are presenting. So, at most, they are willing to learn a few principles that would make their presentations more effective in conveying whatever it is that they want to say. I guess that most presentations look the way they do because of some set of more or less conscious, but still shared set of such principles – conveyed in part by the standard templates available in software such as Powerpoint.

Is this true of programmers as well? Do they want to focus on creating function rather than “form” as well? Do they care that “well-formed” code lives longer, creates less trouble and less overhead in time spent? Are they as uninterested in learning the principles of good design as creators of presentations are?

I don’t know, but I do know that there are many programmers that are fully satisfied if they have managed to create the functionality that the users want, regardless of what the software looks like on the inside. And for existing code, they are content if it works, and if someone brings up refactoring they exclaim: “But it works! So why fix it?”

Then I wondered whether this would be more like a journalist that doesn’t care about language, than a person that is trying to say something with a presentation. But for a journalist, the language is too fundamental for getting the message across. A set of slides is probably seen as secondary: the talk is what matters. Can a perfect set of slides save a bad talk? Similarly, if the functionality a piece of software offers is broken, it doesn’t matter how good the code looks on the inside.

I haven’t read Tufte’s essay yet, but my impression is that it offers principles to follow to improve presentations. Could something similar be done for software? A set of intuitive and easily learned guidelines for writing code that is more sustainable, for people that care only about function.