Engineered projects, formally (or close to it) verifiable: 3D rendering pipeline, distributed database management, garbage collection process, ...
And craft. Which, based on the internet I have experienced, many apps unjustly inflicted upon me, and some memorable restarts between game saves, is most code.
Craft code necessarily involves amateur code, code which isn't economically worth engineering (when you can just throw unit tests at it. Or just wait for user reports!), code referencing weakly characterized libraries or interfaces, and code involving features that have become complex enough that the best reference model for its expected and unexpected behaviors is now itself.
Bzilion's Law of Coding Formalism Levels: "Any ambitious enough software project will descend into an exercise of pure desperate craft. Just before it becomes gambling."
Mathy projects, formally driven: matrix multiply libraries, symbolic computation, constraint resolution, ...
Engineered projects, formally (or close to it) verifiable: 3D rendering pipeline, distributed database management, garbage collection process, ...
And craft. Which, based on the internet I have experienced, many apps unjustly inflicted upon me, and some memorable restarts between game saves, is most code.
Craft code necessarily involves amateur code, code which isn't economically worth engineering (when you can just throw unit tests at it. Or just wait for user reports!), code referencing weakly characterized libraries or interfaces, and code involving features that have become complex enough that the best reference model for its expected and unexpected behaviors is now itself.
Bzilion's Law of Coding Formalism Levels: "Any ambitious enough software project will descend into an exercise of pure desperate craft. Just before it becomes gambling."