Bits of Learning

Learning sometimes happens in big jumps, but mostly in little tiny steps. I share my baby steps of learning here, mostly on topics around programming, programming languages, software engineering, and computing in general. But occasionally, even on other disciplines of engineering or even science. I mostly learn through examples and doing. And this place is a logbook of my experiences in learning something. You may find several things interesting here: little cute snippets of (hopefully useful) code, a bit of backing theory, and a lot of gyan on how learning can be so much fun.

Saturday, December 02, 2006

Algorithmic Design and Architectural Design

There are two types of design decisions we always seem to make while building large programs:
Architectural
Algorithmic

Architectural design decisions are decisions related to modularisation, division of responsibility, information accessibility and such things. For example, in a typical object oriented implementation, they would translate into decisions about class design, namespaces, fields and methods of a classes, inheritance hierarchy etc.

Algorithmic design is the choice of data-structure and control flow.

I feel, documenting architectural design decisions is best done offline, off code, in separate place. On the other hand algorithmic decision related documentation is best placed close to its implementation, as code comments.
Just an observation. Nothing biblical about it.