GDC Code Sharing Session at QMUL

This event, held on the 2nd of November in Queen Mary University, was organised by the Graduate Developer Community (GDC). The participants, around 12–half of them students, the other half software development professionals–were given a challenge beforehand: to write a Sudoku Puzzle solver, and to share their code with the other participants, in order to discuss different coding practices.

A total of three solutions, two developed beforehand by participants in the meeting (in Scala and Clojure) and one public implementation by Peter Norvig (in Python), were presented to all participants. An SQL approach was also presented as an example of an idea that theoretically should work, but that revealed itself unusable, though the challenge is still up: if someone can develop a Sudoku solver using SQL, please share it with the community!

Besides understanding different approaches for solving sudoku puzzles, the discussions about code readability and reusability were especially interesting. A consensus was reached when criticising non informative function or variable names (using x instead of row, for instance, makes the code slightly harder to understand), and also the importance of breaking down the code in small functions with well defined inputs and outputs.

A more subjective topic was a debate around the question if some languages are intrinsically harder to make understandable to others. The Clojure solution was extremely hard to understand for people without any previous experience with Lisp/Clojure/Scheme. The question stayed in the air: can the Soduku Clojure solution code be made more readable for non experienced developers? That challenge is also open, with the promise of being addressed in the next GDC Code Sharing event.

Code Sharing Events take place every first Wednesday of the month, and are open to all graduates and recent graduates within the software industry. If you have to develop software, either as a final product or just to get results for your thesis, this is a very intersting meeting to attend.

Please check their website for further information: http://grad-dc.co.uk/.