Ed is going to Bettys Pies

You know the old adage "When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail". Well, I'm in my stagecraft class, and we regularly have to reverse that. That is, "When all you have is a nail, every tool looks like a hammer." Which I'm sure many of us have experienced in the past, driving in a nail with the but of a screwdriver, the battery of a cordless drill, a caster, a different piece of wood, a belt sander, a router, the butt of your hand, a jigsaw, or in the rare cases when you're feeling industrious, a hammer.

Honestly, the hammer is just about the simplest tool in any shop, and we rarely use them. We just take what we have and use that instead. Why don't they just put a ball peen on every power tool they make? It'd save us the trouble of getting up and actually fetching a hammer to drive the nail in all the way so that the jigsaw doesn't jump when it hits it, or the sand belt doesn't break when it files down the nail head into nothing, or god knows what would happen when the router comes near it.

But that's not the only place I've seen it. I've seen it in programming, having been guilty of doing it myself some times as well. Most recently, for example, I have a very simple "node" object which in ones mind one already knows what it is. It's a sub-object of a parent object that needs several objects arranged in a certain way. Nodes are used everywhere in programming. In this case, in a self-balancing binary search tree I've used for a project in a class. This node has grown to contain:

• a left and right child node (indisposable in a binary tree)
• a parent node (also very useful)
• a value (what's the point of having a node without data?)
• a key (okay, self-balancing trees need something to sort by)
• a left and right child height (I guess it's okay to cache the height so as to not recalculate it every time)
• an article count (okay, that makes s--What!?)
• the current article (Wait up! I'm still stuck on the last one!)
• the IDF (Random unexplained acronyms abound!
• and the phrase length (I give up)

It should have been so simple! It should have gone no further than the key! Maybe have a child height, but no more! Every time we needed the program to do something else with the data, I stuck it into the node as a new data value. The IDF isn't even used in the first half. In fact, it isn't even used in relation to the self balancing tree! I reuse the nodes to get away from having to create a new object to create a list of items linked by parent and child. I'm essentially using a left-right node as a left-only node and foregoing all operations supplied by the tree entirely.

Like I said, when all I have to do is sort, every tool looks like a self-balancing tree node. Yeah, that's right! I pulled it all back together! Didn't see that coming did you?