Wtf? Gecko!

Code Reduction in C# 3

C# 3.0 is god like. Undeniably. The ability to reduce your code is amazing. Now, I understand the code zealots out there will say "Yeah, but X language has been able to do this for years". Well I don't really care about X language truth be told. The .NET platform is so widely deployed and supported now I don't really see why in 9/10 cases I should use language X.

Consider the following basic example, of calculating an Inverse Distance Weighted plot of signal strength of a given location given a set (plots) of locations and their corresponding signal measure.

The formula is simple, for a given point x, the strength is the sum of wk(x) (one over the distance between the two points to the power of a fixed parameter p) times uk (the value at k) over the sum of wk(x):

Traditionally, this would yeild the following code:

double sumWkUk = 0;
double sumWk = 0; 
 
foreach(Location loc in plots)
{
sumWkUk += wk(x, loc) * loc.Value;
sumWk += wk(x, loc);
}
 
x.Value = sumWkUk / sumWk;

Not too much code, but this can be reduced a lot. Consider using the C# 3.0 sum operator:

x.Value = plots.Sum(xk => wk(x, xk) * xk.Value)
/ plots.Sum(xk => wk(x, xk));

Wait, what, did we just reduce that to ONE LINE of code? Shit.

Are you listening Java? No, thought not, no wonder you are still losing the great programming race (or maybe I am just bitter).

Summary:

- Less code to maintain is good.

- Gives us less chances for errors

- makes it easier to read and understand (in this case at least)