I’m not quite sure what lead me to this blog entry, but I find PragDave: Code Kata by Dave Thomas to be a very interesting idea. I had never thought of describing coding practice as similar to kata.
I did stumble into a similar idea once many years ago. I had just finished reading Software Tools by Kernighan and Plauger, when I came to the conclusion that implementing some of the classic Unix text tools from scratch would be a good way to improve my programming. None of the programming problems themselves were particularly hard, but I got the idea that building a clean implementation of each of the tools would help me focus on practical aspects of my programming.
Over the next few months, I built a number of the classic tools. In each case, I worked hard to generate a clean, minimal, and complete implementation of each tool. I went over each piece of code several times to ensure that there was nothing unnecessary or unclear in the code. When I finally declared this experiment finished, I really felt that my coding and design skills had improved dramatically.
I haven’t thought about that exercise in a number of years. Now that PragDave has reminded me of it, I think I may need to pick a similar project to see if I can help keep those mental muscles in shape.