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 »
Several of the past few essays have focused on the notation aspects of programming languages. The major benefit of a notation is making what you want to say concise without losing it’s power in the process. To use an example from an earlier essay, supporting the use of normal algebraic notation for working with matrices… Read More »
When I was getting my EE degree many years ago, one of my professors (Dr. Dave) had an interesting lecture on the difference between accuracy and precision. Even though many people use these terms interchangeably, they are separate concepts. Possibly the most important point of separating these two concepts is remembering that they may be… Read More »
In the book Software Exorcism, Bill Blunden described a problem caused by the maintenance programmer not usually being the same person as the programmer who wrote the code. Often the maintenance programmer comes in with a less-than-complete understanding of the original problem or of the design decisions made for this problem. Usually, there are also… Read More »
Isn’t it funny how you sometimes run into the same concept everywhere at once? A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a piece (Another View of Human Multitasking) refuting some of the conclusions in a Joel Spolsky article on human multitasking. This week, I stumbled across another article, Creating Passionate Users: Your brain on multitasking,… Read More »
As I said in Joel on Wrong-Looking Code, I find Joel on Software to be a good source of information on programming. However, I don’t always agree with him. In Joel on Software – Making Wrong Code Look Wrong, Joel states that he does not like exceptions. He also refers to a previous article Joel… Read More »
I want to preface this article with the comment that I really enjoy reading Joel on Software. I find his essays to be knowledgeable, well-thought-out, and well presented. While I don’t always agree with his conclusions, I always feel that any of his articles is worth a read. So, recently I ran across Joel on… Read More »