At different times in the past I’ve either agreed with or fought the application of coding standards. Recently, I’ve been looking at the subject again. In a wonderful case of timing I stumbled across an ad in CUJ (10/2004) for CodingStandard.Com. They have a coding standard for C++ that seems to cover much of what… 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 »
In The Architecture of Participation vesus(sic) Hacking, Carlos Perez argues against points he sees in the essay Great Hackers by Paul Graham. Having read the two essays, I find Perez’s comments enlightening, but maybe not in the way he intended. I found things in both essays that I agree with, and things in both that… Read More »
The Little Schemer Daniel P. Friedman and Matthias Felleisen The MIT Press, 1996. One of my wife’s friends recommended this book for learning Scheme. He’s a big proponent of Scheme and has even done research into teaching Scheme to kids. He is quite knowledgeable in his field. On the other hand, I have never written… Read More »
If you haven’t tried Subversion yet, you really owe it to yourself to give it a try. I’ve used CVS for over a decade now and I’ve been trying Subversion for a little less than a year. I haven’t yet moved most of my home projects to Subversion, but it’s looking more probable every day.… Read More »
Contrary to expectations, many programmers do not solve problems through logic. This should not be surprising, as the same is true of humans in general. But many programmers I’ve known whole-heartedly disagree with that comment. I’ve noticed that many really good programmers are extremely good at pattern recognition and solve many problems through a creative… Read More »
This is not really a book review. But, due to my recent change in commuting, I’ve been able to begin catching up on past issues of the programming magazines that I read. Due to one thing or another, I’ve gotten behind in my magazines over the past few years. But, I’m making up for that… Read More »
Compiler Design in C Allen I. Holub Prentice Hall, 1990 I decided to take a break from the relatively new books I’ve been reviewing and hit a real classic. Over a decade ago, I saw Compiler Design in C when I was interested in little languages. A quick look through the book convinced me that… Read More »
In The Semantics of Garbage Collection, I explained why I don’t like the term garbage collection. I also introduced the term resource recovery, and suggested that this change in naming could generate a useful change in viewpoint. In the next article, More Thoughts on Resource Recovery, I traced some of the history and side effects… Read More »