To help get me into the programming mindset, or maybe to cleverly sabotage my work ethic, a colleague recently introduced me to a game called Seven Billion Humans. You command small squads of workers through If statements, loops, and basic assignments of memory.
One of the most fascinating lessons in the game is that you can write great code to optimize for size or speed, but you can’t necessarily find a solution that simultaneously optimizes for both. Before I started playing, I had assumed the ideal software would approach a sort of zen koan, something that packed the greatest possible …