But, having said that, ...

ABSTRACT

A persistent rule of thumb in the programming trade is the 80/20 rule: “80 percent of the useful work is performed by 20 percent of the code.” As with gas mileage, your performance statistics may vary, and given the mensurational vagaries of body parts such as thumbs (unless you take the French pouce as an exact nonmetric inch), you may prefer a 90/10 partition of labor. With some of the bloated code-generating meta-frameworks floating around, cynics have suggested a 99/1 rule—if you can locate that frantic 1 percent. Whatever the ratio, the concept has proved useful in performance tuning.

REFERENCES

• 1: Jef Raskin, Comments are more important than code, Queue, v.3 n.2, March 2005 [doi>10.1145/1053331.1053354]
• 2: Fellgett, P. B. 1988. Cybernetics and roux sauce. In But the Crackling is Superb, An Anthology on Food and Drink by Fellows and Foreign Members of The Royal Society, ed. N. and G. Kurti. Bristol, UK: Adam Higer.
• 3: Stan Kelly-Bootle, The computer contradictionary (2nd ed.), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1995
• 4: Ignore the pop grammarians who denounce sentences starting with And or But. See Bryson, B. 2002. Troublesome Words. Penguin Books.
• 5: For some Eastern doubts on this Western "desicating and imperialistic linear" logic, see Faure, B. 2004. Double Exposure. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
• 6: See reference 3.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  A. General Literature
  A.0 GENERAL

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.1 PROGRAMMING TECHNIQUES
      D.1.0 General
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.m Miscellaneous