The Value of intelligent Code

Artificial intelligence is often used by many as a black box term to describe unquantifiable intelligence in a peice of software. It was touted as a revolutionary concept that would change everything. These days it doesn't get nearly as much attention. This isn't the concept I'm talking about.

Ideally, the code you write would be intelligent enough to know when its not working right; it would be able to tell you what was wrong without to much ambiguity. The reality of the matter is: software projects have gotten so huge that its increasingly difficult to debug them, especially when shared libraries are involved and your making calls between those libraries. The code won't speak up for itself, not without a good software developer.

Intelligent code should check itself for errors through conditional statements both through asserts and conditional code checking. This code would check and double check values; it would check preconditions on entry, runtime conditions at runtime and postconditions at the exit. All this checking may very well add alot of overhead; macros can ameliorate this condition.

In the end, the time you save by writing a few conditional checks here and there will save you much debugging and development time.