Potato Programming

"One potato, two potato, three potato, four...."

Potato programming is the sort of programming that encourages you to write your own "for" loops and build up / tear down data structures, rather than passing vectors or iterators down through an interface in such a way that would allow a smarter version of that interface to be more efficient.

In other words, this is the PotatoProgramming way to add a file containing lines of numbers:

f = file('test.numbers')
accum = 0.
for line in f:
    accum += float(line)
print accum

Contrast this with:

f = file('test.numbers')
print sum(map(float, f))

This term was coined by R0ml Lefkowitz.

See also: Potato Programming Explained