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 »
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 »