Can just anyone learn to program or is that skill limited to a few of us? This question or some variant has been on my mind for most of my career. Early in my career, I thought programming required inherent talent, so only some people were capable of learning to program. As I gained more… Read More »
I ran across an unusual article a couple of months ago, Ethical Software by Alex Bunardzic » Right Tool for the Job is a Myth. My first thought was that the author must be out of his mind. After some reflection, I have a somewhat different view. Now I just think he is mistaken. I… Read More »
Recently, Joel Spolsky wrote about Don Norman’s article Simplicity Is Highly Overrated. Joel used this as a springboard to another talk of how simplicity doesn’t matter in Joel on Software: Simplicity. He referenced and expanded on his views from Strategy Letter IV: Bloatware and the 80/20 Myth. As I’ve said before, I often find Joel’s… Read More »
Recently, I’ve been taken with the idea of programming languages as notation. When most people look at a programming language, they see syntax and possibly an underlying paradigm. I see the same, I just find the idea that each language also provides a unique notation for expressing ideas quite appealing. Lately, I’ve been thinking about… Read More »
Many years ago, I was working on application software that we configured and shipped to nearly a hundred clients. Although we did the first installation on a machine that we provided, the customer had to install updates a few times a year. (This was before most people knew about the Internet.) A few of us… Read More »
A couple of years ago, I wrote a set of three essays on Resource Management: The Semantics of Garbage Collection, More Thoughts on Resource Recovery, and Other Resource Recovery Approaches. In summary, my argument in these articles was that the standard mark-and-sweep garbage collection falls down for two major reasons, it doesn’t deal with any… Read More »
Over the years, I have come to the amusing realization that many people feel like they could program if they just tried. You know the type. He (or she) has used computers for a while. He picked up Computer Programming for Total Morons or Object Oriented Programming in C++ and Java in an Hour and… Read More »
In On Proficiency, I talked a bit about what characteristics make up the concept we call proficiency. In trying to hire programmers, a company often tries to measure proficiency to find the best candidate for the job. Over a year ago, I began thinking about how to measure proficiency, and found it to be harder… Read More »
In order to become proficient at any activity, a person needs four things: aptitude interest knowledge skills To some extent, you should be able to judge a person’s proficiency by measuring each of the four attributes. The first of these is the only one that a person has no control over. If you don’t have… Read More »
Of all of the lessons I have learned doing software development, one of the most important was to recognize what kind of problem I’m trying to solve. This sounds pretty trivial, but I’m not talking about the categorization you are probably thinking of. As software professionals, we tend to look at all problems as solvable.… Read More »