All About That Constant

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen “gravitas” used as a kind of software metric. However, if there were such a thing, I think it could probably be measured by the number of predefined constants required to carry out any sort of task. For example, directly programming with sockets and setting socket options has a high degree of gravitas. Simply specifying a port number to a Web framework—not so much. Other examples might include programming OpenGL vs. turtle graphics. Or maybe just about anything involving OpenSSL. Extra bonus points are earned if such constants can get together in an unholy bitmask such as O_RDWR | O_CREAT. Yes, constants. Gravitas.