Lately I’ve been thinking more and more about what it means for a program to be useful. I’m feeling more and more that when I attempt to solve a problem with a program, as I solve the original problem the problem tends to expand in such a way that we didn’t actually solve too much.
This is just a problem of my approach at problem solving and not inherent to solving problems with computers as a whole I think. However I think it’s important we take it into account.
In order to help me tackle this I’m trying to work more and more in solving problems with forth since it seems that it helps me reduce the scope into only whatever problem I had at the start.
An example of this reduced scope is my expense tracking program: project: money