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 »
What is it about the programming field that makes everyone believe that it is easy? I can’t count the number of times I have had someone tell me: All you have to do is… How hard can it be? You just… It won’t take that long. It’s just a little program. etc. Most of these… Read More »
In The Forgotten Engineering Principle, I went on at some length about the concept of Good Enough. I originally began thinking about this idea over a decade ago in the context of Stylus-Based Computers (what are now called Tablet PCs). I hadn’t thought about the concept for quite a long time. However, in doing a… Read More »
Over the last few years, I’ve been frustrated with the Software Engineering industry. I was actually trained as an engineer, and much of what I see passed off as software engineering is not engineering. I’ve been mulling this over for some time without being able to put my finger on the part that bothers me.… Read More »
The subject of naming in code continues. In O’Reilly Network: Ill-monikered Variables and Creative Class Naming [May. 18, 2004], Tim O’Brien adds his comments to the topic of naming in programs. He picks up with Andy Lester’s earlier comments and goes a little further. O’Brien makes the suggestion that creative names are much better than… Read More »
Almost fifteen years ago, I stumbled across the concept of version control in the form of RCS. I wasn’t real sure that this tool was going to be useful for me. After all, it required more work that did not contribute directly to producing code. In order to try it out, I began using RCS… Read More »
And just to prove that some ideas appear in many places all at once, Andy Lester explores naming again in O’Reilly Network: The world’s two worst variable names [Mar. 07, 2004]. Apparently, Lester is reviewing the second edition of Code Complete, one of my favorite books on programming, and says there is an entire chapter… Read More »