It is written We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. —Donald Knuth Most people forget the very next thing he said: Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%. Many developers have lost the original meaning of premature… 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 »
Most professional fields develop a set of best practices that help people in the field produce consistent solutions to similar problems. Any given problem has an infinite number of potential solutions, some of those will actually work. Fewer still will work well. Best practices tend to prune some of the bad solutions by pointing out… 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 »
My wife is a really good writer and she once gave me a great piece of advice for some documentation I was working on: Know Your Audience. This has helped me to write better documentation. Over the years, I have come to realize that the same advice applies when writing code. Who is the Audience… Read More »
In my last post (Thoughts on Code Comments), I described two opposing camps that argue about code comments. Like much of the craft of programming, the commenting of code is too complicated for a simple set of rules. In this post, I will describe a set of guidelines that I’ve adopted over the years. These… Read More »
In the comments on a recent Google+ post, a discussion erupted about comments in source code. As usual, there were two groups that argued relatively vehemently. The More Comments camp was best represented by the suggestion that a good program should have as many lines of comments as lines of code. The Clear Code Needs… Read More »
I’m finally getting back to my blog after YAPC::NA. It’s been a while since I wrote, so I figured I would start off easy. Many months ago, I stumbled across yet another article describing how hard exceptions are (The Old New Thing : Cleaner, more elegant, and harder to recognize). It’s an old article and… Read More »
One of the odd things about programming is that you are writing for two different audiences. One is the dumbest device ever invented (it does exactly what you tell it to do) and the other is a (hopefully) intelligent programmer who will need to read this code later. We spend a fair amount of time… Read More »
Like many developers, I’ve been working with XML for many years now. My first XML-based program dates back to within 6 months of the publishing of the XML 1.0 Recommendation by W3C. I’ve already gone through the phases of: XML looks promising, XML is cool, everything in XML, and XML is just another tool XML… Read More »