Synchronicity

After writing about complex behavior emerging from networks of simple non-linear elements this morning, I read Slashdot this evening to see a story on just that topic. Strange.

Other than that I worked to get the new interpreter system working against the existing test suite. It's mostly there, but there are still a few bugs left.

Ironically, the transaction bug of the day was occurring in a section of code where I was doing a lot of testing to see exactly what command had been issued, and responding accordingly. However, I have an AST that works for me, and after staring at it for 10 minutes I suddenly realized that all the problems would go away if I used the same code for each type of command. Consequently, 12 lines turned into 2, and all the bugs went away. Thank goodness for being able to call into a clean interface design.

This isn't the first time that I've fixed a problem by removing code. Sometimes I wonder if real software engineering is about removing lines of code rather than inserting them. Pretty much destroys the "Lines of Code" metric that some companies like to employ (word to the wise - don't work for these companies).