A recent article ‘Real’ Programming Is an Elitist Myth hit a couple of points that I have been explaining to people for years. Although the author makes a few interesting points, he misses several more. The author describes a system written using a “database as a service” system with little to no code, that solves… Read More »
In The Myth of Code Anyone Can Read, I introduced the idea that least common denominator code (LCDC) is not a good approach to writing software. Among other things, this approach ignores programmer specialization that happens in any team of more than two developers. Mental Caching As a project becomes larger than one person can… Read More »
As a first post in the Best Practices Gone Bad series, I figured I would take an simple example from a previous job. An Example In that position, there were two best practices that intersected to generate unreadable code. The first practice was expressive names. All names of variables, classes, and methods were required to… Read More »
As I said in the last entry, you can separate computer users by their user interface preferences. In that entry, I made the argument that a text-based interface (TUI) is better than a graphical interface (GUI). Since that isn’t inflammatory enough, I’m now going to argue that GUIs are better than TUIs. A Short History… Read More »
One of the ways that you can separate groups of computer users into groups is by their preferences in user interfaces. A few decades ago, most computer interfaces were simple text. The display hardware didn’t support fancy graphics, and the processors weren’t fast enough to do the calculations needed for reasonable graphics. As computers and… Read More »
One coding style issues that causes many arguments is the distinction between the Terse/Elegant/Succinct style and the Verbose/Legible/Debuggable style. As usual, each side explains that their style is the only rational choice and that the other approach is obviously wrong. First, let’s look at the two styles to see what they say. In order to… Read More »
A comment on the Security Now Podcast got me thinking about the concept of write-only languages. Many times over my career, I’ve heard people refer to a language as write only. The implication being that no one can read the code once its written. This phrase does not refer to some magical IP technology that… Read More »
I was listening to an older episode of Software Engineering Radio where they interviewed Martin Odersky on Scala (Episode 62). In the interview, Odersky made a comment about closures being the literals of functional programming. This statement struck me as surprising. The more I thought about it, the more interesting and subtle the concept became.… Read More »
I was reading The JavaScript Phrasebook on Safari and ran across one of my favorite pet peeves when people write about Web technologies. Cookies are not a specific browser technology, but a mechanism in the client/server model to overcome one major shortcoming in the HTTP protocol. HTTP is stateless, which means that the protocol does… Read More »
Beautiful Code Edited by Andy Oram & Greg Wilson O’Reilly, 2007 Although I was really looking forward to reading Beautiful Code when I first heard it was coming out, I found myself a bit disappointed by the reality of the book. Each chapter is written by a different master coders, giving their views on what… Read More »