Hardcoded vs Softcoded

From a user's perspective, a program's job is to do work, look good etc. If you want to look into a program, and very deep into it, you will notice that all a program does is to move data around. Data and code are two very important things in programming, because the code does the work, and only with data there is work.

But the borders can become unclear when you think of it. Data and code do both lie on your hard disk, or in memory when a program runs, so where's the difference? Well, code is data that represents some kind of work.

Magic is all about doing work. "You lose one life" is a piece of work. After the work is done, I might have lost the game. Still, I wouldn't like to have that effect around in my code - in my Java code, at least.

Hardcoding and softcoding is all about how work is represented.
Hardcoding essentially means "compiled". For example, the five colors and the card types are hardcoded into laterna - to change one, you need the source files and a Java compiler to generate a runnable program from it once again.
Softcoding, on the other hand, means "interpreted". "You lose one life", which might be a spell's effect, could be written in a text file. That file is read when the program is started, and will do its work, although it never was java code.

So softcoding is the better way to do work in all situations? Clearly no. Enabling something to be softcoded needs massive effort. Not only do you need to parse the file and get the important information from it, you also need to translate it into a form the program can handle. For Magic cards, this is very complex, since the work is done much later than the card is read, And a card might do different things everytime you use it. I'll talk about it in more detail the next time.