Potato Programming


Potato programming is the sort of programming that encourages you to write your own ‘for’ loops and build up / tear down data structures, rather than passing vectors or iterators down through an interface in such a way that would allow a smarter version of that interface to be more efficient.

In other words, this is the potato-programming way to add a file containing lines of numbers:

f = file('test.numbers')
accum = 0.
for line in f:
    accum += float(line)
print accum

Contrast this with:

f = file('test.numbers')
print sum(map(float, f))

This term was coined by R0ml Lefkowitz.

See also: [PotatoProgrammingExplained Potato Programming Explained]