Code triage
Topics/tags: Miscellaneous, gaming, short
The other day, I received an advertisement for some hard to find games
[1]. I had no plan to buy any of them but I thought it would be fun to
see what they listed. I skimmed the names. One of them was called
Code triage. My first reaction was Boy, that’s a niche game. what
percentage of board gamers care about fixing broken code? [2]
My next reaction was to wonder about the form of the game. I wasn’t
quite sure what it would be like, but I assumed that you would get some
borken code and have to triage it. It could be akin to Name that tune
.
I can triage that code in four days.I can triage that code in seven hours.I can triage that code in eighteen minutes.Triage that code![3]
It could be that you have a hand of approaches to code and you choose one or more of them.
I will triage that code with the DRY principle.I will triage that code by adding unit tests.
Or it could be that the game was a bit more basic. Participants read programs and generate inputs that lead to incorrect behavior.
If I use an array of sizemaxint
, that binary search will break.
My third reaction was to wonder about the language they used. Would it be Java? C? Visual Basic [4]?
But I was too optimistic [5]. Once I saw the cover and read a
description,
I realized that the game was not about code at all. Rather it was about
triaging patients in an ER. I guess the designers were playing off of
terms like Code Blue
and Code White
. But I’m pretty sure that no one
in a hospital ever says Code Triage
or broadcasts it over the speaker
system.
Unfortunately, I’m now left wanting the game I thought Code Triage was: a game in which players triage code. Wouldn’t that be a fun teaching tool [6]? My biggest concern is that it seems like you could memorize the answers; we’d need a way to generate a large enough problem set.
But I don’t have time for that now. Perhaps designing a code triage
game will be a task for another year.
[1] I’ve written previously about the number of board game mailing lists I’ve ended up on. I’ve removed myself from most of them, but I still get a few.
[2] There are a lot of programmers who like board games. But there are certainly a lot of gamers who don’t program.
[3] One version of name that tune
that I learned involves players
bidding on how quickly they can name a tune. I recall a parody of
that type of game from Foxtrot, the comic strip. I can eat that
taco with five shots of hot sauce.
My ten-second search of the
InterWeb failed to turn up that strip, but I did find a related
one.
[4] That’s too easy. You triage Visual Basic by rewriting it in another language.
[5] Yes, the thoughts above represent optimism.
[6] It was long ago established that my view of fun
differs from most
people’s.
Version 1.0 of 2018-07-26.